My uncle in East Germany

points to the unicorn in the painting

and explains it is now extinct.

We correct him, say such a creature

never existed. He does not argue,

but we know he does not believe us.

He is certain power and gentleness

must have gone hand in hand

once. A prisoner of war

even after the war was over,

my uncle needs to believe in something

that could not be captured except by love,

whose single luminous horn

redeemed the murderous forest

and, dipped into foul water,

would turn it pure. This world,

this terrible world we live in,

is not the only possible one,

his eighty-year-old eyes insist,

dry wells that fill so easily now.