I spent much of the month of October traveling throughout Germany, and during a week in Berlin I had an opportunity to visit some of the refugee and migrant processing centers in and around the city. This was at a time when Germany had graciously opened its borders to what Carolyn Forché has called the victims of extremity . . . this at a time when they were arriving faster than the German authorities could handle them . . . at a time when other so-called civilized European nations were turning their backs on this tormented migration . . . at a time when other Islamic countries were quick to turn them away. It is one thing to see their plight on television. It is another thing to observe it up close and personal.
This poem was written one evening in Berlin after a day of witnessing first hand what happens when much of the civilized world, including the United States, turns its back on the innocent victims of incivility in its most heinous aspect.
RAIN
a rainy evening on Alexanderplatz
a Schnell Imbiss on Greifwalderstrasse
drinking Turkish beer a döner box
to nourish me at the end of the day
sitting alone here watching Erdogan
on the big screen in the back
a pause in a soccer match played
in Monchen-Gladbach in the rain
the fellow who made my dinner
shakes his fist at the TV
“lanet herif!!” he curses
that modern sultan who smiles
in Ankara not hearing this
the pleas of his own people
this obscene taunting in rainy Berlin
smiling I try to forget this morning
in a park in Alt-Moabit a steady
swarm of migrants stamping its feet
standing numb in a line steaming
in the rain I study each sad imprimatur
anguish etching many damp faces
no Azhan called out by a muezzin
only the Johanneskirche bells tolling
reminding them who and where they are
they who are beyond their ken and culture
they who transited Erdogan’s land
crossing the vast Anatolian plains
searching for lives better than
the shattered ones they left behind
they who put children in tenuous boats
believing the Aegean safer than land
I try to forget the image of the Syrian boy
drowned and washed ashore in Turkey
Erdogan still smiling in Ankara
while the whole world watches in horror
its tears like so much dismal rain
