A linden sways in Berlin’s air,
soft and still, yet drifting where
it once had danced in golden light,
now falling, fading out of sight.

Once it stood, so strong, so free,
born of spring’s sweet memory.
Once it warmed in summer’s grace,
now autumn’s breath has torn its place.

Yet long before the cold winds came,
I was the storm, I bore the rain.
I dimmed your light, I broke your soul,
never knowing the weight, the toll.

Your roots, once deep, began to fade,
drowned in shadows my heart had made.
And though I never wished you pain,
my weight was yours to bear in vain.

And as our leaves drift to the ground,
we stand as ghosts, lost, unfound.
For you, my light, my heart, my stay,
are gone—and all is cold and grey.

Love once held me close to you,
like roots that held my world in view.
But without you, what remains?
An empty vessel, a soul in chains.

So now I call the wind once more,
to bear us where no sorrows soar,
to dance again, then set us free,
a fleeting breath upon the sea.

Through restless tides and whispering trees,
it sings of loss, it hums of peace,
it stirs my soul, it beats my mind,
then leaves no trace of us behind.

Yet know this truth, to most unknown—
leaves will never die alone.
They follow where their love is blown.

Berlin, Berlin, just what art thou?
A cake of layers baked from fates
by many bakers, cold and proud,
who filled it with chunks of bitter dates.

The cream on top is cloying, sweet,
to compensate for the stale flour
and brownish yeast of marching feet
with bruised crabapples, soft and sour.

To try a slice of this complex taste
isn’t easy: It’s baked in haste.

Fifty years ago, the future came,
built in concrete, tile, and bright lights,
underground station, undergirding the fame
of this city, adding to its manifold sights.

Now the future’s a place that smells of stale beer,
barely lit by futuristic lamps in disrepair,
wallpapered in graffiti, strewn with gear
of the pale homeless who’ve made this their lair.

They, like this chipped, grimy, forsaken place
are left in the dust of our dreams’ mercury pace.

The promise of a future bright
encased in a temporal temple:
It sits among Berlin’s blinking lights,
a spaceship made to resemble.

Its oracles stood in this aluminum starchurch
dressed in sparkling ABBA track suits,
alit by glittering disco ***** with lights that search
for the future’s many loyal recruits.

But futures seldom turn out the way
that priests of the modern prophesy,
and this once sleek starship sits, decays
while stoic streams of cars drive on by.

What happened to the dreams we had
of federations who deep space explore?
Was it all just an ephemeral fad
now left in twilight, to be ignored?

Then again, this is Berlin, the place
that is built upon its broken dreams —
Utopias all cast aside, but which grace
this city with abandoned and fading gleams.

The starship sits in unending preflight,
awaiting the signal to lift off.
Its digital clock counts down to delight
but never makes it past Hasselhoff.

Climb aboard Battlestar Berlin, my friends,
fly with warp speed to nowhere at all.
Before you know it, the latest trends
will leave you yearning for total recall.

I’m walking by the dimming remains
of a building of future past:
its once stylish streetlight, now decayed,
points at the Moon that’s rising fast.

The old streetlight was made of globes of glass
that circle its core of steel bars.
It looks like a starship, sleek and fast,
but now its globes are dusty and scarred.

The globes, a circle of eight bright moons,
orbit the streetlight’s tall spire
that points up to the glowing sky jewel,
to the place to which it aspires.

Up there, on brightly lit lunar plains,
our spacefarers once walked in awe
and dreamt of Zarathustra’s booming strains
in two thousand and one proud hurrahs.

And so this spacecraft of glass globes
was made to look up to the stars,
to urge us on to launch further probes
and take wing from this blue globe of ours.

Years later, this dream has faded
to fleeting stars of reality shows,
who leave the people fixated —
not by the Moon’s, but by screens’ dim glow.

The streetlight was fixed firmly to earth,
iron bolted to grey crumbling concrete.
But it still points up to the heavenly berth:
Moon rises, a dream left on repeat.

In darkness, a church
of carved Baroque stone
catches me walking
unawares and alone.

Two stone hands reach out
from the church outer wall.
A gesture of blessing
or a prayer for us all

in stony carved silence
that echoes the voice
of a God we can’t hear,
who stays quiet — by choice?

Just when we need
to hear they’re right here,
they feel like a veiled cloud
that is more distant than near.

Still these outstretched hands
remind me of this:
Divine’s in the touch
of human hands’ godlike gift.

A Berlin building. Sunbeams of steel
made to shine in suns of future’s gold,
now dreary, dimmed and forced to kneel
to the timeless gods of growing old.

Its shining future could not last.
Sinking in a golden fade, a forgotten grail.
Of sunbeam ore, new futures are cast,
bright dreams unbound by fear’s black veil.

From the forge of steely sunbeams
comes a new grail of sunlit dreams
and the tireless gods’ tired reign
is overthrown for another day.

Sitting in the subway.
All fix their eyes on screens —
What does this sight convey?
Is this all that their lives mean?

Berlin, Berlin,
contradiction city.
Grey concrete hulks stacked around
old buildings rising pretty.
A never ending construction zone
that tries to top the past
while dancing ’round her history
whose pallor shadows cast.

i.
I walk through the streets
of old Spandau
under a sky of slate and zinc
that lets loose its sleet
and drops of pale ink,
filled with burdened clouds
weary from hurrying onward
out of the iron east.

ii.
A church tower stands sentinel
watching over the people fleeing past
on cobbled streets paved with fate.

iii.
Once, to doubt was to believe
as Thomas, bereaved,
called out in awe
My Lord and my God.
Today there’s just doubts,
faith is fleeting as clouds.

iv.
The tower waits,
outwardly strong,
yet forlorn and alone,
abandoned by the faithful
as the sacred slips away.
It watches and waits
in hollow hope of a time
when its hallowed purpose
might yet be whole again.