A Conversation with Martin Heidegger
10
In your Nazi nights, when Hannah visited you,
by your troubled fire, bringing Augustine,
to discuss her dissertation, there on your shelf,
his thoughts on love by the trash, did you say
how it escaped the flames that gutted you?--
echoing, Love, nothing counts unless we say so.
Martin, did she say, You mention love twice
in all of your works; what counts for Nazis?
Did you say, Fatherland, Home, Children; did she
ask, What more than dogs? They weren't Nazified.
I'm not interested in your sentiment. That's
what she thought and was too kind to tell you.
We learn to converse by questioning ourselves,
Augustine said, then speaking of his community,
did he echo Goebbels or explain how love draws
our will, by invisible skeins on pulleys of light,
toward That of which man's a faint echo, free
to sing or be hollow. Rags of truth give odorous
sanctity to solipsisms your New Student hangs by,
as wits of brass alchemize iron to tin
and dream pop alloys from plastic and aluminum.
Martin, your dying fire needs a new limb: perhaps
one from that brilliant Jewess,
over whom your logic hails assassins.
Did you not tell us words have consequences;
the limb of thinking is the way of waiting?
Van K. Brock
A Conversation 11 | Ein Gespräch 10
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