Love Through Gray Concrete

"when it's raining on one side of the street
& the sun's shining on the other side,
they say the devil's beating his wife.
Let's not speak of official good & evil
but of a man & woman spooning bodies,
knowing what it takes to make love
go through gray concrete brightly."

Yusef Komunyakaa, Nostalgia
From the Sunday New York Times, in honor of the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago today!

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* at first I wasn't all that interested in reading poems about The Berlin Wall (admitting my ignorance here) but i was surprised to find how much each of them touched me. Many of the authors used the separation of lovers as a tool to show the kind of longing and displacement that occurs when a city is divided in two. Because, even if we don't understand what it's like to live in a place torn by political turmoil, we do understand what it's like to miss someone - and the way that tears our hearts.