Bright day, liquid sunlight spilling from a tipped pot,
staining the ground light and dark marble. We sit outside
the Bauhaus school and watch a group of students raise
an unspooled film of plastic, how the breeze fills it,
how it billows and curls organic, sea creature in the air;
in the park we make a game of naming trees, birds, flowers,
then waft between the rippling walls of a cloth house:
learn it's an artist's response - feminist, environmentalist;
postcard streets drip with locals, tourists, we trickle through,
find water, find stamps, read aloud the googled answers
to our many questions, leave laughter in fallen leaves behind
us. Later, over a bowl of steaming spices, I free a fervid cry -
howl I carry in my chest, fear for a limp future--
But in the present here are friends haloed in evening sun
and boarding the return to Leipzig we're ebullient again,
trading chocolates, thoughts & anecdotes, opinions on living,
society, health - twittering children in a private sphere
while evening falls and Germany rushes past ever darker;
looking out the window in a breath of quiet I see again
that sheet of plastic film outside the Bauhaus school
how it reared and surged, how it breathed as it heaved,
organic.
