In the exhibition poster stands J.S. Bach,
dusty and grimed, but unbroken, unscathed,
in a poise graceful, his air baroque,
as if the bombardiers wanted him saved
and sound, his lofty airs singing in their heads
as they unleashed the bombs to severe life’s frail threads.
 
Alone he stands, lord of the rubble world
unperturbed, his heart the stone his body
is, his wig secure, his vision unblurred,
but oblivious to the century’s cacophony,
to music assembled out of broken things,
to sounds made with hands on barbed strings.
 
Intrigued by the poster’s jarring notes,
wondering who, the day after, with steady hands
could hold a camera with unshattered lens
to record how Bach survived the shots
while Leipzig toppled like a house of cards
in God’s unerring sights, I join the weihnachtmarkt’s
 
jovial throng. Another Christmas, post-Berlin Wall.
A season of forgetting and remembering
marked in the east by signs of renewal,
as sunken monuments rise again, and those standing
now look respectable and clean. But Bach still wears a smear,
though the cathedral behind has a new veneer.
 
Verwendungen is the exhibition’s stark title
staring from the new town hall. On the balcony
four old men grind sad tunes, a reminder
in the festive air of  Leipzig’s past agony.
Turning from the carnival I climb the winding stair
eager to learn the history written there.
 
Scenes of before and after lead the tourist’s walk
from Leipzig’s baroque bloom to the Weimar’s cabaret days,
coming round slowly to the hour of shock
when truth and beauty crumbled in the blaze.
Whole streets lost their names in the eye’s  wink.
A charred child and doll make even post-Auschwitz men think.
 
After the Nazi parades on the wide screens
and the Führer’s tempestuous speech,
I read an account of a girl in late teens,
how on her birthday she went to teach
and came home to four corpses in their seats
ready to spring on her the birthday treats.
 
Then a battered door on which is etched
the silent screams of one who lived it bomb by bomb;
each day of rage, each siren cry  in detached
cuts in wood. A door whose house is now gone,
preserved like the shells for public eyes,
tells the tale better than art which often lies.
 
A little shell-shocked I rejoin the Christmas throng.
Seeing Bach there I understand the faith
of one who said Music is beyond bombs after a Grieg song
performed while the rounds on Sarajevo rained, though in truth
trumpets have also brought walls tumbling down
and at the world’s end again shall be blown.