Martin Burke

  Martin Burke is a poet and playwright living in Brugge, Belguim. He has had poems published in many magazines in the U.K., U.S.A., Ireland, Austria and Sweden.

The Voice of Memory

  i.m. Primo Levi

To remember

To carry the burden of memory

To carry and bless it with speech

This is the duty history places on a voice and that voice responds

To tell it to strangers in unlikely places

To bear witness to the beast and the law

To speak –but the burden remains and history will not forgive him

Yet he speaks and is an average man

Factory worker, voice of memory –can these ever be reconciled?

He says Yes and who will dispute this?

His says Yes and continues to be both

But to have seen, to have known, the core and heart deformed and twisted

To say that after language only language remains

To speak and to bless, to speak and forgive

Yet is there forgiveness?

Can the twisted be atoned when language was the enemy?

This is the conflict in the heart

This is what syntax must unite and resolve

This is what language must weave its way about

To have seen to have known –and everything thereafter in aftermath

History at the gates of reason and desire

To remember and speak

A love-song the heart is burdened by as it sings and sings

And the electric air alive with implications

All this in our time, all this in his time

Nothing forgotten and nothing denied

Unplying the knots of the twisted heart and speaking with love

Speaking to one stranger after another

A tale retold and retold but never –how could it be?- exhausted

A duty contained in many voices and continued by others in which history might yet absolve itself

So speak with love and nothing less

Let all verbs and vowels unite for this

Sing something of the heart’s endurance and try to understand

Let the heart insist that love is in the singing