#patrick hicks

It seems that my need for poetry this month has been directly tied to the state of the world around us… and so as the world gets uglier, I dive deeper into poetry. Poetry is most frequently a balm for me… a soothing salve that eases the bruises of the day. But sometimes poetry is more than a balm… it opens a door, invites me through, and shows me something rare and special. The poem I selected…

Patrick Hicks

On my way back to Belfast I wandered past Bebelplatz, smelled the air for burning books, glanced at Brandenburg Tor, and went to that open field, Potsdamer Platz. I chewed the alien words until, like the Berlin Wall, my trust in language simply collapsed.

Bordered by dead grass and foot-churned mud, the long barrier, thick as memory, attacks the horizon– a concrete scalpel slicing through the city. I move to touch it: rough, strong, as dirty as politics.

A fresh hole smashed into the Soviet concrete allowed noisy graffiti to frame East Germany. I clasped a hook of rebar and swung myself up onto the back of history. I straddled the Wall, one foot here, the other there, while a helicopter thumped in the distance, its angry rotor reminding me of home, of Belfast. I close my eyes and hover above the city of my birth– the puff of tear gas, the pop of bombs, funeral processions that twist through flag-ridden streets. The Peace Line, thick as memory, slices the city in two, cleaving hate from hate.

After we picked you up at the Omaha airport, we clamped you into a new car seat and listened to you yowl beneath the streetlights of Nebraska.

Our hotel suite was plump with toys, ready, we hoped, to soothe you into America. But for a solid hour you watched the door, shrieking, Umma, the Korean word for mother.

Once or twice you glanced back at us and, in this netherworld where a door home had slammed shut forever, your terrified eyes paced between the past and the future.

Umma, you screamed, Umma! But your foster mother back in Seoul never appeared.

Your new mother and I lay on the bed, cooing your birth name, until, at last, you collapsed into our arms.

In time, even terror must yield to sleep.

Patrick Hicks