There is the one side and the other,
and between there is the wall. Each side
has its monuments, its flags, its currency,
its bulletholes, its notions of the other.
Over here we say the beaten in the lobby
of the crestfallen. Some days we pity them.
Over there they watch us through binoculars.
Over there they call us fascists.
There, here is over there, and their maps
of where we are are coloured white,
as ours are of them. No one
over there can fall in love over here.
Here the street ends and there’s wall,
and on the other side the same street:
tramtracks, kerbstones, streetlights
coming on, pedestrians about their business.
They do not wave or look back. It is
as if we were each others’ ghosts. Either side
history comes with a wall round it.
We are each other’s terra incognita.
Somewhere there’s a piano playing boogie,
and on this side a late-night argument
strung out with booze and bamboozle
till the word gets lost in the many
qualifications of itself, and it all ends
in tears. Over there the long silence
broken by dogs at each change of shift,
some border guard on his two-stroke.
And everywhere it seems a night bird
fills the dark with long pulses of his song.
He doesn’t care to be one side or the other.
I understand where this late night music
of a sad piano is coming from.
I understand where that long
leashed baying of manhounds is coming from.
But I don’t understand where the nightingale
in these long pulls of music through himself
and the buildings and the trees
or from which side of anywhere he is singing.