If the Gods of East Berlin Were Alive Tonight 

they’d be dancing naked in a field in Lichtenberg.

Throwing their shirts on to the fire, getting their asses wet 

on tall grass

in a summer gateless as an orchid 

fraudulent as the party trick you said you’d never pull, but you do

then you go back to the patch where Brecht is buried.

It’s 4.54 am the sun is shred over Prague, Warsaw 

over faces of girls with tiaras

boys with green nails, milk teeth, no memory of these fields

ever stretching all the way to Moscow, O Great Europa 

give yourself to a boy whose country no longer stands

no longer bows. 

Boy vanishes in a crowd, returns 

points to his naked self on his friend’s phone, his naked self 

in a wheat field, ready for anyone, to do anything, so

you put your hand in his mouth

and touch the voices that followed him 

all the way from the suburbs.

Now a street lamp frames the outlines of a song 

a sun readies for a big load 

and in the cool shade of a courtyard, overlooking the bins

a mouth opens 

a head tilts and takes what’s needed 

to put out the fires that come with living.

Sitron Panopoulos