Standing on a wooden platform,

Overlooking the cement block Wall,

Facing a wooden lookout tower,

Containing two East German guards,

Armed with machine guns.

Behind the guard tower

Stands a spackled white apartment building;

Below the armed tower

Several children are playing.

Away to the east of the Wall

Lies a vast, dark, open space

Containing huge, lifeless, old, heavy, gray buildings.

To the west of the Wall

Lies an expansive open space,

Cleared of the war-bombed rubble,

Where sits a lonely, empty, small, pink, spackled house,

With the sights and sounds and colors of

Vibrant West Berlin behind it.

Several yards to the right of the wooden platform

Sits two opposing wooden guard houses,

East vs. West, glaring,

With two rising and falling traffic barriers

And several watching Army guards

Facing each other,

Armed with machine guns.

Across Berlin to the north,

In the newly planted Tiergarten,

Grows fresh linden trees.

The Unter den Linden Strasse,

Lined with fresh barbed wire,

Leads to the famous,

But war-scarred Brandenberg Gate.

On top of the mammoth Gate

Sits a glass bubble

Containing an East German guard

Watching Russian soldiers

Parade daily down the Strasse

To their WWII War memorial.

Like a big, brown bear,

Always expanding and contracting:

Russia is Russia, and

Europe is Europe, and

Never the two shall mix,

Like oil and vodka.