Under the net cast by the cloud-scratching blinking
outclimbed and outshone world’s-first-television-tower
as fire-engine rather than police-car sirens howl
I close the window and peer
at reds greens yellows crashing fizzing whooshing,
at children running around among burnt-out shells,
at cackling students dodging flames and permanent blindness
on the street corner
and wonder, “Why does the culture
that produced Beethoven, Goethe, Hegel,
Mozart, Luther, Schiller, Wittgenstein,
Marx, Freud, Wagner, Brecht, Schrödinger,
Schopenhauer, Engels, Holbein, Strauss, Kant,
Heine, Jung, Nietzsche, Schumann, Copernicus and Einstein find it
acceptable to throw fireworks around the place?”
Perhaps that drunk teenager with the hood
and the jeans halfway down his arse
and the spotty nose
and the incomprehensible German
is actually Karl Marx
hurling the firecracker of Dialectical Materialism
at his mate with the stripy beard
and the bottle of Jägermeister
and the slutty girlfriend
and the untied shoelaces
who is really Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
“Have that, you prick!” I think he shouts.
And as booms flash and flashes boom,
as donner blitzen und blitze donnern
across the smoke-befuddled new-year himmel,
it would be crass of me
to imagine that I’m in London
in Nineteen Forty,
but I do anyway.
