My father taught me not to fear
a moment of forgetting.
“If it’s important,” he said,
“you will remember it.”
With Mom and me he watched
on black-and-white TV
families divided by barbed wire
as the Berlin Wall went up.
No sooner did it fall
than he was on a plane.
He would cross Checkpoint Charlie,
walk through the Brandenburg Gate,
bring us back shards of concrete
spray-painted and demolished,
fluorescent green graffiti words
divided, not forgotten.
Claudia Gary’s new poetry book, Time and Other Solvents, is a story of healing. She teaches workshops on Sonnet, Villanelle, Triolet, Persona Poems, Natural Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, and more via Zoom, at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately. Her latest chapbooks are Genetic Revisionism (2019) and Someone Likes You (2025). She is also an advisory editor of New Verse Review as well as a health/science journalist, visual artist, and composer of songs and chamber music. See pw.org/content/claudia_gary