Now home - Markus Bruce Heyder

 You were here
carrying me through Berlin 
like a gust of wind carries a leaf;
from my perch inside you,
I peeked into long forgotten courtyards
whose rusty metal gates had been opened up
to reconstruction crews after hollow decades.
Swinging in your stride through history, 
I smelled wet cement and renewal 
through your nostrils, not mine;
looked at people with your face,
and hungered with your body.
I wanted to sit down and
dissect a pomegranate with your fingers
and feed myself its countless juice-tears 
through your mouth,
and think back on this glorious year
and how you carried me like a sputtering flame 
cupped by your hand,
and how happy I am when
I feel your weight on the swing 
I hung for you in my heart.
What sense of peace to carry and be carried,
to cup and be cupped by another! 
Our love is a love inside the other, inside the other, inside the other,
like a Russian nesting doll,
and is twisted into a Moebius band 
along which we will continue to travel 
round and round through the other,
now inside, now outside,
now carried, now carrying.


Markus Bruce Heyder is a 62 year-old German-American poet and retired lawyer. He was born to an American mother and a German father in Germany, where he spent most of his childhood. At the age of 22, he moved to the US where he has lived in Denver, Colorado; Middlebury, Vermont; Chatham, New York and New York City; Chicago, Illinois; Alexandria, Virginia; and, since 2013, Washington, DC. He has been writing poetry since his late teenage years.