Käthe Kollwitz, Mother with her Dead Son, enlarged bronze casting 1993, original sculpture 1937. Photograph by Rafael Rodrigues Camargo via Wikimedia Commons [CC-BY SA 4.0]

52.5179º N, 13.3955º E

Prussian shades of Berlin sky optimistic         but walk by large gates

                                                                                    prison-like

                        “a silent space for reflection”

large grey marble cube with no way out

                                                            and inside        a mother

                                                                                    crouched brown-bronze

            hand over the head of the son  not to annoint 

                                                                        not to protect   after death

                        they have left flowers by her feet

not just men     plastic army replaceable                       but relations                                                                                                    

            we wait outside the gates         wander in softly         

26.1590°N, 98.2703°W

Ursula             through the fencing     inside  

                                                            bright tarps cover small bodies

            in the stars       Ursa Major and Minor

                                    mother and child

                                    together           but in Texas     the little one alone

                                                                                    children in chainlink cages

From Poetry Editor Molly Jean Bennett:

The sculpture that occupies the center of Berlin’s Neue Wache (“New Guardhouse”), positioned on the city’s East/West axis and now serving as a public memorial to “victims of war and tyranny,” goes by two names: Mother with her Dead Son and Pietà. The piece is an enlargement of a 1937 work by artist Käthe Kollwitz, who once wrote, “I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, the sufferings that never end and are as big as mountains.”^[1] Kollwitz, whose younger son was killed in World War I, focused much of her artistic career on standing up to state violence and oppression. By the time of her death in 1945, the Nazi government had largely silenced her voice.^[2]

Directly beneath the statue are interred the remains of an unknown soldier and an unknown concentration camp victim.

^[1] Cordaro, Luján. “Käthe Kollwitz / Women in Art.” Samizdat Online, October 2016. Accessed 2019. http://www.samizdatonline.ro/kathe-kollwitz-women-art/

^[2] Freeland, Lucy. “Käthe Kollwitz And Berlin‘s Neue Wache.” Culture Trip, October 2016. Accessed 2019. https://theculturetrip.com/europe/germany/articles/k-the-kollwitz-and-berlin-s-neue-wache/