A Conversation with Martin Heidegger
2
These shapes fill and hold long-violent days:
your home, Freiburg, the university, your hut here
in the Black Forest Mountains, Europe--half-patched
after the war-to-end-wars--that feudal bloodletting.
New tributaries to their old bloodstreams, England
and France backed thugs against the yearnings
of the long denied remnants of the Triple Kingdom
(careful not to displace tarty, perfumed auntie),
new paperdolls from ministries in Paris and London,
our Bureau still jostling anti-fascists in '42,
while our boys died, as still, for Latin puppets--
cartoon figures with bald heads, mustaches
all shaping your thought, as it still scars ours,
garishly changed when your Dr. Goebbels said,
"Burn their books!" Blunt's my way, Martin.
Later--
charnel smoke shrouding Europe--you
chat
about Hölderlin's torn homecoming, over alps,
to folk, forest, field, both of you trapped in misty
nineteenth-century metaphors, dreaming a reunion,
Anschluss.
What part of that
great green field
is our forty acres; what arc of that blue-eyed sky,
a friend asked, is home?
Where the tongue splits
into poetry and politics, poetry, you say,
is silence, a comfort to many. Is this calculative,
Martin, this meditation, this silence?
Van K. Brock
A Conversation 3 | Ein Gespräch 2
Contents | Mudlark No.
4