Dead Week: A Cross-Examination

By Henrik Eger

Henrik Eger with one of his concentration camp puppets, Puppet (r)Evolution, Swarthmore College. Photo: Alex Griffin, Aug. 2013.

DEAD WEEK: The week before final examinations at colleges and universities in the US and Canada, known for its notorious stress.

It’s dead
week, time to 
abstain, except for allowing 
thoughts and memories 
of spasms, teeth, and hair, *
instant coffee, blood,
and instant replies
to leak
onto my desk.


True, terror is

not of one individual,
one mob,
one group, 
one country,
but of the soul, 
the great realm 
equipped 
with emotions, gas
fixtures, and wheels
within wheels.

OK, Father, **
you’re first.

Ernst-Alfred Eger, World War II correspondent, circa 1942

What did you do in 1944
when you witnessed
your own
chosen people
rape
the earth in Russia, ***
force 
the dead to dig
their grave,
get undressed,
bend
at the edge of the pit,

Mass execution at a pit, Russia, WWII

and fall
on top of those already
gone?

When you saw
arms sticking out,
waving,
what did you do,
Father?


I know.

Bailey Smith, former Southern Baptist Convention President, declaring, "God does not hear the prayer of a Jew."

You turned silent,
impressed
my youth with your 
shame (or so I thought),
until, more than 33
years later, you went
on the air
and told the children
of the survivors
that “God does not hear
the prayer of a Jew.” ****

Oh Father,
Father.

And you, Mother,
what did you do,
apart from calling
politics a dirty game
and raising me and
Calley, *****
your youngest son?

Why did you give him
guns for Christmas?
Why did you praise
his manhood
when he shot
birds?
And why did you stay silent
throughout all wars?

You know that even
today Calley
masturbates
every night,
dreaming
of peasant girls
in Vietnam, vaginas
filled
with grenades.

Drinking Coors from a
throwaway can,
he drowns
the noise of past
explosions
inside enemy
women
with fresh loads
of sperm and foam.

Mother,
your silence

hits me
like bad breath.

And finally, you
or I, same thing:
The cursed-blessed one 
who has to share
his bed with God
fearing racists,
angels of xenophobia;
the white
black
amongst tenured
academics, weathered
cowboys whose boots
walk over women and
the last few imprints
of a pair
of moccasins.

Son of naked roots
and open wounds,
why don’t I
shut up,
instead of wrapping
my feeble protests
in mini-speeches, ****** 
delivered regularly
every Monday night
between 5:30 and 6:45,
collecting good points
like a Sunday
school kid?

Henrik Eger, guest speaker at Society for Technical Communications (STC), Chicago, Spring 1985

I became a member of Toastmasters International at Oklahoma State University (OSU), 1980-81.

And worse, why do I
stay, my stomach
filled
with cheap hamburgers,
instant coffee and
instant two minute
replies, my mind
blank
when my friends 
stand straight,
when they—in unison
and unashamed,

spew
pledges of patriotism
over a piece 
of stained cloth?

No, baby, regurgitating
isn’t good enough;
vomiting
poems won’t persuade.

Instead, instead
of acting
victim and voyeur,
stop playing
savage,
servile games;
learn to control
the terror of the soul;

try to understand the mechanics
behind the wheels
within wheels;
and don’t faint
when you are hit
by the stench
of silence.

But most of all,
before you cut
colleagues, brothers,
others,
look into the glass
of judgment:

reflect.

It’s dead
week, time to abstain,
except for allowing
thoughts and memories
of spasms, teeth, and hair,
instant coffee, blood
and instant replies

to leak
onto my desk.

* Reference to Nazi concentration camps.

** My father, a German journalist, witnessed a mass execution in Russia in the winter of 1943-44, an event so horrible that he lost his belief in the Fuehrer, even his will to live and, as everything he wrote had to go through a censor, he wrote to my mother, “Read more than my letters. Read that which I did not write. Read that which could shatter my heart.” This quote became the opening of Metronome Ticking, a Holocaust docudrama.

*** Countless Poles from the military and the intelligentsia got mass murdered by Stalin’s Russian troops in the Katyn massacre with over 20,000 victims. My father, a young war correspondent, witnessed a similar mass execution in Russia. My mother never told me who the victims were, most likely Jews, Romani, Russians, and others considered Untermenschen (sub-humans) by the Nazis.

**** Bailey Smith, Southern Baptist Convention President, Aug. 22, 1980.

***** William Calley, former United States Army officer, found guilty of murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War.

****** Member of the Toastmasters International club at Oklahoma State University, 1980-81.


Spring 1981, Updated October 25, 2017

If you are interested in publishing or adapting this copyrighted poem by setting it to music, staging or filming it, etc., please contact the author. 

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