Poetry – Issue 11 | January 2011
Cologne
by Rick Mullin
One springtime morning in Cologne,
on business, traveling alone
and walking at an early hour,
I came on Konrad Adenauer.
Copper-cast to human scale,
a statue on a flower trail
that ringed the chapel of a church,
he stood beneath a newgreen birch,
a solid man. He looked at me,
or over me—at Germany
he cast a solemn gaze. Or grim.
For no one seemed to notice him
save one of little consequence,
a stranger in the present tense
like S.T. Coleridge in the past
who walked through rolling shadows cast
beneath the vampire-pocked cathedral,
before this modern tetrahedral
church engaged the student throngs.
Amidst the gargoyles and the gongs
that plague this stinking, stony city,
Coleridge penned a light verse ditty
dark enough to be recited
in a netherworld benighted,
or in a perfumed ivory tower,
or to Konrad Adenauer
on the dark paths of the Rhine
where foul air strokes the Sonnenschein.
About the author
A journalist, painter, and poet, Rick Mullin has travelled for decades on The Man’s dime, primarily in the U.S. and Europe. He has underwritten some of his own adventures as well. Favorite destinations include Istanbul and Marseille. His poetry can be found in various journals, including The Chimaera, Envoi, Measure, The Shit Creek Review, and Unsplendid. Read his chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, or his book length poem, Huncke.
Read our current issue, Issue 11 | January 2011:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
