A Conversation with Martin Heidegger
13
Your offer to help reeducate Germany refused,
we embraced scientists who had helped demolish
Warsaw, Minsk. . . and fattened on
slave factories, savage camps. No silence
can atone for such calculations.
No one can give these forms their one name.
We have neither the depth nor breadth.
I can only try to know myself--all I can bear--
nightyears trying to elude an enveloping pettiness.
Will they be us? Am I uncompromising?
Martin, I dream of your escape to a mountain hut,
where streams speak the one language that's true
and no one sells another.
At last you spoke of unwilling, of opening
toward being, that which becoming opens
to--letting go of sidesteps, calculations.
You have shown us scales and stakes.
We, the uncertain ones, live among smoldering
unknowns, contracted to their one name:
hundreds of millions in mass murder--in this
century--every continent, almost every country.
Manipulated by endemic madness, numbed.
Readier to lie and kill than to know and create.
We prepare ourselves in a subtler Treblinka.
But it's nice here in your hut, almost like home.
Van K. Brock
A Conversation 14 | Ein Gespräch 13
Contents | Mudlark No. 4