CAFFE MEDITERRANEUM

To get to the Med on the dream map of Berkeley
I had to abandon my body of a child and learn
to operate my body of an old man. I had to crawl
through poison oak and coyote-brush dripping with ticks,
on hillside game-paths where I saw the city burning.
In my dream, the café was still there at the center
of the earth, in media terrarium, and the same bearded
regular from forty years ago were still chewing the fat
over the same cappucino in the same corner (biographies
in genetic wreckage of those marble tables, chipped,
kissed, burned and lost and never to be deciphered).
When I hit town, if you were truly hip you still called it
the Piccolo, and when I ran in breathless one afternoon
in Feb. 1969 to break the ageless hush and yell "they’re
using tear gas on campus!" not one head turned to listen,
but I would have to accept birth and let go of death before I
could begin to understand this dispassionate wisdom.
Passionate wisdom? the denizens of the street are fresh out,
and I’m not sure I accept any definition of community
large enough to include me, but you never know where
the heart is until they amputate. Once the Med disappears
I don’t know what fires I will have to crawl through
or what lives I may negotiate to get back there.

-John Oliver Simon

Berkeley’s poetry Walk was laid in October 2003 along Edison Street between Shattuck and Milvia Streets. The route includes 128 metal plates with excerpts from songs, each of which is related in one way or another to the city of Berkeley.

The current sign features a poem by the American poet John Oliver Simon (1942-2018). Simon studied at the University of Berkeley, and lived in the city and was active in the "Free Speech" movement and in the struggle for People’s Park in Berkeley (a struggle in 1969 for the attempted expropriation of the place by the University of Berkeley, in the confrontation that occurred on Bloody Thursday, an American athlete who came to visit was killed, and many were injured. The cafe Caffe Mediterraneum (also known as Med for short), was the meeting place in the 1960s for the extreme left movement that founded People’s Park. The song talks about the cafe and the events at UC Berkeley.