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Pasternak Time: “The Bible improves with years”


Pasternak Time: “The Bible improves with years”

The Bible improves with years.
How useless the cynic with “It’s all useless!”,
The optimist absurd as the pessimist.
The psalmist knew many days
Who waited with joy for sunrise,
Gave thanks for small beauties it revealed.
He had seen enough for a lifetime
And exile was always just around the corner.
Comes a time faith alone is all that’s left.
The Bible, returned to as we do to home,
Home’s landscape and meetings in all weathers.
There rages argument about Russian,
Which words in what order work and why.
Tongues proliferate across the Soviets,
Out across the world of raging nations.
And Job sits amidst the results
Sorting out how it’s them and it’s him, both:
We sit down together gazing at loss.
Tyrants may scan the borders,
Send their enemies to the bombed frontline,
But it is still a child governs the household
And hope alone, immaterial hope, persists.
The Bible, fragments left from big explosions:
Those little first churches of old Asia Minor
Built on nothing but breath and bare stone.
Everyone is dealing with the fallout.
Temptations are personal, like religions.
Miracles in the midst of great crowds,
Unjust trials more gruesome than reality
And a death over before it began.
When I was a child
I read the Bible like a child.
How we see our world afresh there
Where everything built is apt to age
And love alone is passed along,
That love may grow. We rendered
Unto the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
And its Great Leader its due,
But unto you the greater part.

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