Dear Gunter


Badri Raina

Dear  Gunter,
look what you have done now—
gone for the golden horns
of the holy cow.
Your this blasphemous tantrum
hollows out all that you gathered
in that  soulful  tin drum.
And why now at eighty four,
when , O Grass, only  a wisp of
time’s  last hay lies before
you? 
Is it that passion for the truth
or mere prejudice
that  makes you  say this?
And even if it be the first,
who will believe that it is not the last?
The Zionist church is aghast
that you may or may not remember
the sixty million who were lost
to slave trade (just read thou Zinn),
but that you should so underrate
the celebrated holocaust.
Or those others who were burnt
to cinders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
or in the orange killing fields of Vietnam,
or annihilated in Iraq or Afghanistan,
Gaza or Romolla,
or in the millions in Latin America
and  dark Africa, and  Indonesia,
do all those now qualify to the same
status as victim as Mordecai or Ephraigm?
Could your frame of historical reference
ever be more wonky, O foolhardy dunce?
All this goes to show how little noble
is the Nobel; and how the world’s knowledgeable
god’s chosen children fail.

Comments

M.L. Raina said…
Doesn't Germany have a tradition of antisemitism dating back to Prussian empire? Think of the novelist Ernest. Junger who wrote a novel called the marble cliffs about the first World war and excoriated Jews and other non-aryan races. Or the French dramatist/poet Paul Claudel. Or the jackboots of Charles Maurra 's action francaise. And yet I would go with Auden and pardon them all for'writing well'. I would look at Gunter in that spirit.I remain

Your congenital contrarian.
MLR
April 14, 2012 at 7:44 PM
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