She Called Me Her Own

Blissful and joyous, the city stood,
And I, a stranger, lost and lone.
Yet foreign I never felt beneath her skies;
She opened her arms and called me her own.

That day is no memory, but a permanent tattoo
Of everyone prancing, laughing, living free.
From exquisite drag queens to playful pups and ponies,
From nonbinary divas to wine-like leather daddies.
From powerful, handsome dykes on bikes,
To angelic femmes, glowing wild and free.

Some of them were friends, some of them were lovers,
some were strangers and some were haters.
So strong was her pull that she made even gravity seem weak,
For before her, we were but specks of rock,
drifting together through her ever-expanding milky universe.

She is no New York or London, but she makes everyone forget about home,
be it the artsy Eastside or the lush green Tierpark, the weird “U-Bahns” to the spicy Nollendorfplatz,
somewhere in this vast wilderness everyone can find their own cozy platz.

She isn’t a city, she is a vast ocean of openness and belonging,
taking us in one and all, the weird and the ordinary, the neurotypical and the neurospicy,
the feminine and the masculine, the pragmatist and the idealist, the artist and the engineer, the leader and the worker, the simple and the posh.

For she’s the divine mother,
who loves all her children the same,
however different and diverse,
however distant the worlds from which they came

She sees no politics, no race, no gender,
none of the borders that patriarchy drew.
All she sees is love and a child’s longing for its mother’s warmth,
and wholeheartedly opens her arms wide enough to hold us all in.