I’ll sit it out again. I won’t process, or wave a palm, or feel myself the less for sloth and mild indifference that now consume what once an ardent cleric’s bow to Lenten fast declared. I must confess that distance lures with ease’s dull caress.
And yet for all the church’s deftless plough’s denial’s slick, her stifled truth, and how tradition’s root-subversion won’t address the scandal of her flight from mess enfleshed, I’m mindful still of love incarnate’s vow that’s lost and won in Godforsaken slough.
The worse it gets the more it matters, the more we want the tinselled bough to switch us into thoughts of how the baubled nonsense deftly scatters the worst of human God-wrought pain. For now we tell ourselves the terror must but be product of an error that has no power to wipe the stain of all we think we might evade. But Holy Conflict’s charted passion in Land no sense could ever fashion now joins that place’s sad charade.
Much realer is the Christ-gripped end that can’t and yet must all this mend.
My mitre’s height a sign to all that pastoral wiles must hold in thrall the sick and poor in opiate’s maw, present an opportunity to force my orthodoxy’s plea as misappropriated law.
I’ll post it on the internet, for that’s where relevance is set and church is bolstered in new ways. The power that’s vested in me now confirms the gullible – and how! – My hubris shown in flaunt-displays.
Why did you taint my water’s chalice, With muck adulterate my crumb? Why do you turn, with easy malice, My final freedom to a slum? Because I’ve not succumbed and taunted My friends’ so cruel passing? And Because I’ve faithful been, undaunted, To my dejected motherland? That’s it – without the hangman’s gibbet There’d be no poets. Penance-cowl And sackcloth garb will not inhibit – We’ll take our candle out and howl.
Зачем вы отравили воду И с грязью мой смешали хлеб? Зачем последнюю свободу Вы превращаете в вертеп? За то, что я не издевалась Над горькой гибелью друзей? За то, что я верна осталась Печальной родине моей? Пусть так. Без палача и плахи Поэту на земле не быть. Нам покаянные рубахи, Нам со свечой идти и выть.
You feed it with your vanity because you cannot stop yourself. A game, you think – it shows you’re bright – but every time you send it more banal or brilliant thoughts, you just lose any claim to own them and connive to blunt your didact’s edge – arrive at voided bluster’s halt.
The avaricious, anxious pluck the sign that you both give a fuck and don’t – and now you find the fruit you thought belonged to folly’s suit of primal Adam’s excised rib repeats in sputtered belch’s squib.
The urge to feed the beast enslaves us all – it’s why we kill the thing we love, and why the thing we love entices too. The Fall has lost its hold, we think, and so we try to hoard the fruit of our beguiled delusion – for nothing fools like fell-denied confusion.
We know enough to know we don’t, and yet we think we know enough to fill the void a Christless world presents. The Christ we let that world embrace a shadow to avoid that yet empowers those whose convict-bluster is too contrived to keep its pseudo lustre.
And now detritus-sum of all we think we are persuades us that the beast-machine will free us from a burden we deny. The star the Magi followed we will never see because our hubris tells us that we’ve banished the lure of fruit that really hasn’t vanished.
Like leaf that’s blown about in churning gust, so every single word I’ve written must then always withered be and no less faded. And all my words to you are somehow jaded. They will not be recalled when silence falls. My effort’s wasted – writing only palls.
So if perhaps they wrote a line or two a stranger would remain as such to you. For friendship’s words you are not really yearning. You’ll catch a glance from those who seem discerning; that wordless look remains within your dreams and for your hearted tongue and teary streams.
Kuin lehti, jota tuuli lennättää, niin kalpeaks ja kuihtuvaksi jää jok’ainut sana, kirjoitettu tähän. Ja sill’ on sulle sanomista vähän. On mykkänä se unohtuva pois kuin sit’ ei koskaan kirjoitettu ois.
Jos ehkä kirjoittikin rivin, kaks, jäi vieras sulle sentään vierahaks. Ja sanoja et kaipaa ystävältä. Saat katseen kaikki ymmärtävän hältä; se katse sanaton jää unelmiis ja kieliin sydämen ja kyyneliin.
A friend I never met – the internet will do that to you – died the other day. A passionate debunker, one who knew that matter’s guts – anatomist was he – were where he met the Christ. He crafted to believe the mystery of the wounded truth of the incarnate, naked love he preached to discombobulated pious ones.
As all good holy fools, he knew his limits – they were his hard-wrought dissident’s expression. The sinews of his near-myopic candour would burst their dreams as three-dayed celebration
erupted in his honest, fervent hope in justice-resurrection’s bloody grope.
How many times must Russia’s conscience die – Must Pushkin fall to duel’s silly end, Must Lermontov pursue him by and by, Must Yuri now be Lara’s deathless friend?
Akhmatova no longer waits outside Kresty with all the others. Anyway, the prisons have been emptied in a tide of desperate hate’s diversion-war today.
Yes, Mandelstam would find the words again, though Stalin’s now from Piter – oh, for shame! And Yevtushenko might still spot the stain that sullies Babi Yar’s forgotten name.
Why must it be that all the pain there’s been, which once at least inspired your greatest ones, is now in fratricidal horror seen, as on the innocents you train your guns?
lingua fennica 