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You are here: Home / 4.2 / Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall

4.2, Poetry by Shael Herman

Sunday morning
I go in a drizzle
to Check Point Charlie
and peer over the barbed wire
someone points across it
toward a building where his brother
slid home on a rope of knotted bedsheets

my turn:
border guards check my pockets
shoes      camera

the East is a time machine
takes me back 25 years
the Reichstag a blind beggar
burnt out since 1945
soldiers goosestep across the grass
Arbeit macht frei

lunchtime:
a scabby woman serves me goulash
mostly potatoes
points at her throat
whispers she’s had it to the gills
can I do anything about the wall?
I see it through a dirty pane
machine guns and sentries at fifty yards

when I start to answer
a potato catches in my throat

 

Shael Herman is a graduate of Tulane University Law School, where he was a member of the Tulane Law Review. He went on to become a professor at the law school as well.

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Call for Submissions: Special Issue on Iran

Call for submissions by Iranian women (trans & non-binary inclusive) writers. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

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