Bundestalk in Bonn, 1984

A junket of scholars

from Uncle America,

fully bright,

meets the chancellor on the stair.

(Even though they came to see

the economics minister step down.)

With large and sinewy words,

he probes if they have seen the glossy

media hall with its morality,

resistance to the Nazi peril.

They have.

They have.

Just yesterweek he banqueted Pennsylvania:

the farmers of wooded Lancaster County

spoke a dialect he'd heard before,

borrowed from the Rhineland of his childhood.

(Nods that know of ethnic roots

and grins that gratify.)

America and its money, he senses,

are moving away to the rim

of the Pacific; "das stinkt! ─

Tell your president that when you return."

The Rhine is only metres away,

where a coal, barge, labors, against, the flow.

- Richard Hacken