A Poem a Day (651): NaPoWriMo Day 20 - Heart of stone

 
Day 20 
 
Prompt: write a poem that recounts a historical event. In writing your poem, you could draw on your memory, encyclopedias, history books or primary documents. www.napowrimo.net
 

Heart of stone
 
A heart of stone
sits on the mantelpiece,
it never gets dusted,
locks its history inside.
 
Your eyes flit to it, wherever
you stand in the room. Grey,
chipped, heavy and cruel,
somehow it fell.
 
The wall it hails from grew
four metres from the earth,
the outer of an inner parallel.
Between them sat the ‘death strip’,
where the people dodged gunfire
under an all-seeing moon.
 
They pierced Berlin’s heart in 1961,
divided it in two with concrete
to keep every East German out.
Soldiers watched them night and day
from 302 watchtowers. Somehow, 5,000
crossed over, but 191 died trying.
 
They thought it would never end,
but the Peaceful Revolution brought it down.
Thatcher didn’t want it to fall.
Luckily, no one listened to Thatcher.
 
The ‘Shield and Sword of the Party’,
the Stasi, with its quarter-million spies,
were no longer needed, the people released
from this orchestrated campaign of
surveillance pitting friend against friend,
lover against lover.
 
They drilled holes in walls to listen and watch,
paralysed victims by destroying reputations,
crushed relationships, sabotaged careers,
split families in half with paid betrayals.

A time of travel bans, gaslighting,
smear campaigns and bugging.
Social isolation, then suicide was rife,
so if the guards didn’t shoot you…
 
When the wall finally crumbled,
people found their own surveillance files,
discovered they were one of millions.
Most of the ‘unlucky’ had never known why.
 
They said it would never come down,
but in the end it could not stand.
It couldn’t outlast the will of a people
determined to be free.
 
Vickie Johnstone, April 20, 2024

A great book on the Stasi is Stasiland by Anna Funder.