! ! Technology - A Thumbnail Tribute To Martin Heidegger Poem by Michael Shepherd

Tekne’, to the Greeks
was the art of bringing-forth
from the true (and, it’s hoped, the good)
into the beautiful:

poetry; sculpture; machinery of wood and metal
such as that which raised the Parthenon;
raised Apollo, Venus, out of stone;
raised myth out of poetry.

And I, we, too have technology
forever at our finger-tips..

Did it happen through chance,
through procrastination,
or through attention given
to a task and needs,
this ‘beautiful’ solution
that mathematicians talk about?

it happened on one godgiven day,
scrubbing those shining new potatoes:
the right-hand thumbnail now grown long
suddenly a more efficient tool
for removing ‘eyes’ and hollowed dirt..

so now, this intimate and valued tool
carefully shaped between a v and u;
and from the fingertip to heart
arises wonder, awe: the gentle curve
of nail gives added strength.. how magnificent
the humblest, least worshipped fingerends
of these so precious hands…

Do I mimic man called ‘primitive’
as I depend on nature’s tools
to alert the inventive mind
by the attention which, taken so for granted
links us to the gods themselves…?

Tools first, then machines, then ‘technology’
have no limits under divine law:
call them, the exteriorisation
of our brain, our mind:

thumbnail, bridge, interstellar rocket
are thus one in wonder; every action
now to mind and heart, a sacrament;
the bringing-forth, the showing-forth
of Man – the tekne of the gods;
the gods who live, who wake from sleep,
only when Man rounds the circle with his praise.

“Questioning is the piety of thought.”