A Conversation with Martin Heidegger
12
Martin, I've meditated, and calculating risks
to me, I would rather be silenced than silent.
Those are the choices we have where we are free
to see or not, as we please. Quizzes you pose
on creation and destruction, the relation of those
who reap power's prizes to dark abattoirs--let me:
Why does God hide? Is poetry mush? Will it feed
the disenfranchised poor, the confused prisoners?
What mirrors permit trafffic between torn Europe
and those who tore? Are our smoother obsessives
more educable than yours? Your silence and ours
were accessories. No one's innocent, but innocents
gasp and die in your sentences, and in ours.
We swallow blood of old scripts, wasting brown-babies
as terrorists to keep Hollywood safe, caring more
for fetuses than for the slaughtered, ignorant,
and (on so many levels) starving. Christ bleeds
in museums; we embalm children with shrivelling ideas,
petrified by the old terror in the bloodstream.
Martin, we don't know yet which of us is better.
Loyalty of those whose work you would have burned
for Goebbels the year of your loud ascent, makes
you as hard to disregard as to pardon. You owe
too much to those who bore blows you didn't oppose.
Sartre made you our hair-of-the-dog after the orgy.
But God's not dead, you responded, only hidden.
Yes, Martin. He was silenced, alone, in prison,
with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Brother Dietrich died there.
But he was only one of the numbered and unnumbered.
Van K. Brock
A Conversation 13 | Ein Gespräch 12
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