Berlin

Friday, August 26, 1955: I arose very early as was custom. No one was around. I strolled out across the street, around the block, for several blocks and wept at the sight of the devastation. I plunged into a reverie and fell into the mood to write it down and returned to the typewriter:

Ten years now since the world war tragedy!

High fences
Rusty fences
Proud, haughty fences around the former grand estates leveled in humiliation
Windblown gates unkept now hang and creak on rusty hinges

Ghosts of yesterday
Ghost houses, ghost yards
Broken swimming pools remind of luxury of the forgotten rich
Proud estates, spectre houses, all so still
No playful shouts, no children laugh
Silent walls, silent houses, silent death
Empty mailboxes—no letters ever more for them
Buildings leveled, pride leveled, innocence suffering

Naked pockmarked walls, and weeds that grow from toothlike stabbing jaggedness indicating where—
Chipped walls
And glassless windows, cold and open to storm and sky
Boarded windows
Bricked-up windows

Jagged chimneys pierce the skies
Iron bedsteads hang
Plumbing pipes reach into space like dragon claws
Twisted steel
Doorways without walls
Arches without buildings
Porches and doorways, nothing else, porches and doorways
Ceilings of splintered wood, shattered plaster hanging like cobwebs
Stairways lead to no place

Here are trees
Tall trees that lean, one sided
Amputated limbs and trunks but not by saw
Jagged stumps of arms that point at—whom?
Grotesque figures stand against the sky, pointing into space accusingly

Excavations like graves
Excavations which are graves where rodents play and insects find their homes
Bricks are here
Broken bricks and pulverized
Piles of bricks that cover bones of people never found

Rubble
Foundations upended
Rotting wood
Twisted steel
Destruction, devastation, desolation
Broken fountains
Shattered statues
Creaking shutters
Rustiness
Ugliness
Jaggedness
Screaming jaggedness.
Walls, chimneys, trees, all grotesque writhing apparitions
Persons? Things? Dragons?
Disfigured deformed giants slumped in misery and shame

Pockmarked trees, gaping wounds healed over
Vines climbing naked trunks to cover broken limbs of torn and battered trees 
Green ivy trying hard to cover nakedness of gaping walls
Ivy trying! trying!
Small trees, ragged shrubs growing untended from the rubble
Grass atop the jagged walls holding brave little flowers struggling for existence
Nature trying to sweeten sourness
Squirrels scampering
Tiny birds twittering
To bring back life to deadness