Sitting on the Berlin Wall

Patrick Hicks

On my way back to Belfast I wandered past Bebelplatz, smelled the air for burning books, glanced at Brandenburg Tor, and went to that open field, Potsdamer Platz. I chewed the alien words until, like the Berlin Wall, my trust in language simply collapsed.

Bordered by dead grass and foot-churned mud, the long barrier, thick as memory, attacks the horizon– a concrete scalpel slicing through the city. I move to touch it: rough, strong, as dirty as politics.

A fresh hole smashed into the Soviet concrete allowed noisy graffiti to frame East Germany. I clasped a hook of rebar and swung myself up onto the back of history. I straddled the Wall, one foot here, the other there, while a helicopter thumped in the distance, its angry rotor reminding me of home, of Belfast. I close my eyes and hover above the city of my birth– the puff of tear gas, the pop of bombs, funeral processions that twist through flag-ridden streets. The Peace Line, thick as memory, slices the city in two, cleaving hate from hate.

Again in the middle of Potsdamer Platz, I look from side to side, and reassure the worried concrete that there is still work to be done.