– Einstein & Freud & Jack –

Death is a dead, at least that’s what Freud said.

Long considering, he finally thought

Life but a detour longer or less long;

Maybe that’s why the going gets so rough.

When Einstein wrote to ask him what he thought

Science might do for world peace, Freud wrote back:

Not much. And took the occasion to point out

That science too begins and ends in myth.

His myth was of the sons conspired together

To kill the father and share out his flesh,

Blood, power, women, and the primal guilt

Thereon entailed, which they must strive

Vainly to expiate by sacrifice,

Fixed on all generations since, of sons.

Exiled in London, a surviving Jew,

Freud died of cancer before the war began

That Einstein wrote to Roosevelt about

Advising the research be started that,

Come seven years of dying fathers, dying sons,

In general massacre would end the same.

Einstein. He said that if it were to do

Again, he’d sooner be a plumber. He

Died too. We live on sayings said in myths,

And die of them as well, or ill. That’s that,

Of making many books there is no end,

And like it saith in the book before that one,

What God wants, don’t you forget it, Jack,

Is your contrite spirit, Jack, your broken heart.

– Howard Nemerov