Love Parade

Pan blew the pipes but Mammon called the tune,
In Duisburg, not Hamlin the love rats danced,
all eager for the press of flesh, entranced
by hopes of sweet joy in the afternoon,
driven on by the techno beat, they soon
faced concrete and steel as the flood advanced

Children of a hopeful generation,
yearning for a country where they could feel
the beating of freedom's drum, elation
not guilt borne by a defeated nation,
grandparents ground beneath the Nazi heel,
quick slaughter in the night by air force steel.

Parents, behind walls in separation,
long languished in guilty isolation,
even before they had torn down the wall
and Duisberg heard the Turk's Muezzin call,
the urge for peace and love was a siren
calling youth to cast off their country's pall.

Of earth, nourished by iron and bloody bind
where hot metal and war had formed the kind
of trading cities all along the Rhine,
rebuilt by sweat, slaked by Pilsner or wine,
from office space and steel mill, surged those blind
rustic passions that will not be confined.

Crammed like lemmings they found their way into
the concrete entrance and were forced to go,
between the walls of that fatal tunnel
crushed and ground together in a funnel
like discarded litter in a runnel,
until some climbed out but fell back below
and lay crushed beneath fear's stampeding flow.

Now guilt of a lesser kind has decreed
Charivari will no longer proceed
along the dull graffiti covered walls,
for fear joy unconfined again will breed
the dithyrambic madness that soon calls
for youth's sacrifice in Valhalla's halls.