Wo sind die Elefanten?

East Berlin in February, twenty degrees below

Hurrying figures hunched against the darkness and the snow

And I watched them file down Karl Marx Alley, queuing at the light

So they can cross the road and fade into the night

If I could only find the German I once learned from

the BBC

I could ask them: Are they happy? Are they free?

But only one phrase lingers on from lesson three

It remains in my brain like a lonely refrain

Like a song that has no ending and is sending me insane

And I say: Wo sind die Elefanten? Faces turn and stare

The question sparks no answer as it dies upon the air

Wo sind die Elefanten? No one wants to know

Or dares disturb the silence of the snow

And I thought I knew the answer long ago

The young man wears a party badge, a clenched fist in his head

And his speech marks out the future, and for him the future’s red

And I watch him as he builds a wall to keep the shadows out

From an ordered world that has no room for doubt

Does he believe the chants he marches to, the slogans and the lies?

Or does he calculate that that’s the way to rise?

And is that certainty he wears for a disguise?

And again in my brain there’s this lonely refrain

Like a song that has no ending and is sending me insane

And I say: Wo sind die Elefanten? What’s the latest news?

Are they doing tricks in circuses or locked in concrete zoos?

Wo sind die Elefanten? He doesn’t seem to know

Or won’t disturb the silence of the snow

And I thought I knew the answer long ago

Now the Berlin wall is crumbled like sand castles in the sea

And there’s been a revolution where it wasn’t meant to be

And I’ve watched the crowds on TV as if waking in the dawn

They see the old world dead, the new world not yet born

And are they bright with hopes of videos and dish-washing machines

Big Macs, cosmetics, polo magazines

And "Dallas" on their television screens?

And I hear everywhere: Cash is king, drop your share

in the corridors of choices; are there voices still

that dare to ask it?

Wo sind die Elefanten? Nomads roaming free

Once they ruled the continents from the mountains to the sea

Wo sind die Elefanten? No one wants to know

Or cares to break the silence of the snow

And I thought I knew the answer long ago

Once elephants roved Hampstead Heath; it’s still in my mind’s eye

I see them silhouetted against the eastern sky

With their trunks raised up in triumph to salute the rising sun

And then one day I woke and they were gone ...

Those strange fantastic creatures with their gentle caring ways

Too large to fit the landscape of these days

Where nothing is preserved unless it pays

But the poor are still poor and there’s greed and there’s war

And the muck is junk-house squalor that the dollar cannot cure

So tell me: Wo sind die Elefanten? Weeping for their dead

Circulating sadly round the dried-up river bed

Wo sind die Elefanten? Vanished with the snow

Were they just a dream of long ago?

A story for a child I used to know?