Cost

Is it getting harder

To see where we are going

The stars that once guided

Have been blocked out

By a cloud of unknowing

The path trodden by our fathers

Has been left

Overgrown by despair and inflation

As schools prepare us for

An artificial intelligence

Where is the home our

Parents promised us

The job for life and a

Prosperous retirement

Is it only for a select few

It’s always was

With grandparents paying for the future

Their blood absorbed by

Sand and sea and land

Thoughts

My parents grew up taking a tin bath in front of a coal fire. The toilet was at the bottom of the yard. It seems almost medieval today. But the cost their parents paid and all people of that generation paid is immeasurable. Did their devastating loss mean there was so much more for my parents and I? And now that we’ve spent it all, what comes next?

Today’s picture is from 21 years ago when I last visited Berlin. Here is the wikipedia entry:

Berlin is a sculpture on the Tauentzienstraße in Berlin, the capital of Germany. First conceived in 1985 and unveiled by the husband-and-wife sculpting team of Brigitte Matschinsky-Denninghoff and Martin Matschinsky in 1987,^[1] the sculpture’s principal motif, a “broken chain”, was meant to symbolize the severed connections between West and East Berlin due to the construction of the Berlin Wall.^[2] After the Wall was dismantled, the sculpture was bought by the city from Matschinsky-Denninghoff to commemorate this period in German history.