The significant. The love for humanity. These are Heyen's priorities…. And another one: to fight "this unfathomable oceanic ignorance of ourselves," the "arrogance, dogma, ignorance that did this."…

Along with feelings of guilt, grief, and responsibility, then, in The Swastika Poems there is life-giving benevolence and art….

[The Swastika Poems] begins with a prosy description of Heyen's father on his 1928 immigration journey to America. It is not anti-poetry, may not perform the magic by which poetry identifies itself, but is clean-reading. Usually in Heyen this way of writing can suddenly take off into unexpected regions, as in "The Numinous," which nonetheless begins ordinarily:

                We are walking a sidewalk
                in a German city.
                We are watching gray smoke
                gutter along the roofs
                just as it must have
                from other terrible chimneys.
                We are walking our way
                almost into a trance.
                We are walking our way
                almost into a dream...