Chris Bays

Ballooning over Berlin

What once imprisoned people, what once killed hundreds caught in cross hairs between barbed wire and watchtowers, is but an array of colored concrete, rubble sold on EBay, a reminder that some walls are not meant to be mended.

Red, yellow, green and blue. Spray-painted sections mark the remnants of a dictate that once cut through this city: government must maintain order at the cost of life. From a distance the wall is now barely visible – roads and alleyways have been built to cross its divide.

I can’t help but imagine that far beyond the broken chessboard below – beyond its buildings and towers spinning like Lego blocks in sun-filled clouds – that some professor paid a king’s ransom for a brick to hold down a pile of term papers about the cold war.

dusk-filled desert . . .
howls of a coyote
by the watchtower