200 Prologue Part 3

The swish young philosophy students

gush over the coffin

of recently-deceased Georg-Wilhelm-Friedrich Hegel.

“His spirit has been liberated

from the contradictions

of the material world,” one wag

proclaims to much applause.

There is much life in death. Darwin,

Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Dawkins,

Thatcher, Putin all take note and applaud,

while Kierkegaard rummages

glumly around the churchyard

for bones, Cantor sings of infinities

in his Prussian padded cell, and

Gödel goes down on uncertainty

and starves in a land of nothing burgers,

to the grim yet beauteous accompaniment

of Collatz’s organ music soaring up

into the empty mystery of the world.