Michael Broek

The Logic of Yoo 11

He had secrets.
Not a blooming day went by
when he didn’t think about what he hadn’t
yet thought about. Absence:
enough butter, enough wine, enough silence,
enough language, enough clean wash
blowing in the breeze.
Enough children, enough times yes was said
without regret.
Such experiments, just like all other matters,
were, of course, called “secret Reich matters.”
5
His secret
was he couldn’t let doubt go.
A man was not a knife.
A man was not a perce-neige in the night.
A man was not a stone column or a barrow.
A pluralism was not a relativism.
Where there were many & enough,
a sharp-eyed gleam still shifted under the snow
being awoke.

 

 


5“Testimony of Rudolph Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz,” Nuremburg War Crimes Trials, 15 April 15 1946.