Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy?

This is one of two short papers given by Philip Harvey at the first Spiritual Reading Group session for 2014 on Tuesday the 18 th of February in the Carmelite Library in Middle Park. He also gave a paper on that occasion, which can be found on the Library blog, entitled ‘A Rationale for Purgatory’ . Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls in one of her books how her husband, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, would say that when reading poetry we can spend a great deal of time discussing what it means, but the first and main question about a poem is not what does it mean, but why was it written. That is the place to start. Here are eleven reasons that I offer quietly to help us think about this poem: Why did Dante write The Divine Comedy? You may have other reasons and these are invited. We will spend most of our time today looking at meanings, but also at why. I wrote these out as they occurred to me, so there is no priority order. 1.      He wrote the poem because ...
4 comments
Read more

The Walk (Seamus Heaney)

This poem was read aloud at Janet Campbell’s funeral in Hamilton in Victoria in December 2006. Janet was a great lover of poetry all her life, a great reader of poetry, and she read everything of Seamus Heaney. Indeed, when she worked in Melbourne or London bookshops Janet would grab hold of Faber pre-publication copies of Heaney if they came into the backroom, and disappear for days, copying lines onto postcards for her friends, transferring lines into her lifetime of diaries. Diaries that were also a lifeline. Janet read everything, but Heaney was one of the regulars. Seamus Heaney keeps a tight line. He is rarely though completely opaque and the way into this poem is the word ‘longshot’. We only find in the second of the two poems that we are being asked to look at two photographs. Or, at least, poems that are like photographs. Or, better still, strong memories that have taken on in the mind the nature of longshots. The two poems in one are reminders of close relationships. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Poetry of Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams delivers the twelfth John Rylands Poetry Reading last year   This is a paper given by Philip Harvey in the Hughes Room at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne on Sunday the 6 th of December as one in an Advent series on religious poets. The original title of the paper was ‘The text that maps our losses and longings’. Everything Rowan Williams says and writes reveals a person with a highly developed sensitivity to language, its force, directness, instantaneousness, its subtlety, indirectness, longevity. A person though may speak three languages fluently and read at least nine languages with ease, as he does, and still not engage with language in the way we are looking at here. Because Rowan is unquestionably someone with a poetic gift. By that I don’t just mean he writes poetry, I mean he engages with the life of words, their meanings, ambiguities, colours, their playfulness, invention, sounds. We find this in those writings of his that delibe...
Post a Comment
Read more