Rain

        
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