Book Burning.

• Author: Rogoff, Jay
• Position: Poem - Poem

Book Burning Fire loves paper but adores people. Fire eats our words, hurling them off like flaming birds on bright black wings. Smoke must cough but fire sings, breathing deeper, sucking down our oxygen. Fire is not our brother's keeper. It isn't a question of good and evil; it guzzles the broth, consumes the table. Heine guessed a modern truth: they burn books first. The night of the fire on Unter den Linden what rang up the curtain next door at the Staatsoper? Die Zauberflote, its gorgeous noise lit with love, a book of seduction, light, and learning. We walk through flame, daring hell and high water, dancing and burning, our fancy fired up till real tears drop; or Tristan and Isolde, romantic hell on a Celtic ship, love mating death till both look the same. Fire crests the wave of the blood-dark ocean, extinguished breath blood-wet with kisses: lovers, poison, and none left to blame. On the Opernplatz the students wave a sea of dark arms engaged by armbands and oozing the spume of cream-pale hands awash in the air. Goebbels commends their courage to break the intellectual reich of the Jew and homosexual; and face the blaze, courage to erect in this vast empty platz, banal and funereal, a tower of books...