A Flower Behind Bars

A Dirty Floor

Anywhere else,

And it would be just another

                                Ordinary

                                Dirty

Floor.

But here,

In this    Long,

                Empty,

                Cavernous

Room,

With whitewashed walls

And mlky windows that dim the sunlight

There is something unnerving about it all:

The way one’s voice echoes

Off the dirty ridges

Of the yellowed floor tiles.

And slowly, it becomes clear,

Why it unsettles a person so.

We are, after all, in a prison.

“For obvious reasons,”

Emphasized the tour guide

“A lot of other execution chambers

Were converted for use by butchers

After the war,

For obvious reasons.”

For obvious reasons,

An imperceptible gesture to the floor.

Anywhere else,

And it would be just another

                                Ordinary

                                Dirty

Floor.

And anywhere else, the blood has long

Seeped into the earth.

Here, though, it lingers.

A Prison

Hovers above the park

Where I feed ducks

Tall turrets of centuries-old brick

Gothic windows with iron bars

Stone fortress walls

Lined with barbed wires.

And sometimes

A duck flies over the wall,

Perhaps he prefers prison food?

And I hear laughter

From beyond

But it was, as they say,

An inside joke.

A flower behind bars

We toured it, the prison.

For its architectural anomalies

And historical attrocities.

Gruffly

They removed from us

Our passports, purse, phones,

And herded us into a crowded corridor

With walls  made of bars

and windows covered

by milky glass.

It was then the tour guide

Realized he had forgotten something

 And turned back to his office,

Closing the bars.

Locked into the cell

Of walls made by bars

And windows of milk

We stood,

Not prisoners,

And yet…

The window, I saw, was opened

Just a crack of a crack

Held in place by a padlock

And beneath,
from a tiny courtyard

Stretching up to us

With the smallest pale face
And petals strewn on the ground
like teardrops from a recent storm:

A blooming, ivory

Rose.

ABOUT THIS POST: These  poems were written after touring a historic prison around the corner from my apartment. This prison is noteworthy not only for its age (the oldest part of its architecture was constructed in 1506), but especially for the fact that there is an execution chamber used by the Nazi's during the Third Reich.  This chamber was used to put to death various shades of people ranging from hardened criminals to political resisters to the ambiguously defined Volksschaedlingen, or social harm.  As you can imagine, one of the aspects of German society that became skewed during the Third Reich was the justice system, and this memorial site bears witness to the injustice wruught by a legal and fully-functioning court system. Many of the people executed were killed for petty or ambiguously defined crimes in pursuit of creating a purer society and race. We were able to tour the prison and see the inside of the execution chamber, which are obviously not open to the public, as well as the accompanying museum, because a colleague here was able to organize it for us.