#pasternak
i have traveled a long way
to be waiting in a cheap motel
passing time reading the words
of dead russian poets
waiting for you to arrive.
four am is especially bleak,
and no restless sleep is
as purely restless,
no sound
more angry forlorn and
temporary than cars on the
highway besides.
i would never know by your voice
filtered by space and electronics
what is moving through you.
i must look in to you.
so i wait now for you to knock,
alone in the company of
pasternak's tears
until i see you and understand you
are well.
Sep 23, 2025
Sep 23, 2025 at 2:37 AM UTC
Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]
When to the Sessions of Sweet, Noisy Thought
Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 30
I don’t need to summon up remembrances
They simply wander in uninvited
In death just as they did in life, good friends
To sit together with our jokes, our drinks, our pipes
We still argue with each other, our minds
So familiar after all those happy years
Thesis, antithesis, and Dunhill tobacco
Ice cubes rattling in the soft summer dusk
Lewis and Tolkien show up late, stern Milton too
Remembrances? Not really – we are forever here
Nota bene:
In Moscow, 1937, during the annual Soviet writers’ congress—a time of severe purges—Pasternak took a courageous stand. Amidst the dull, regime-prescribed speeches praising Leninist-Stalinism, he did something extraordinary. He recited Sonnet 30 by William Shakespeare:
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste.”
The impact was profound. All two thousand writers in the hall rose to their feet, joining Pasternak in this act of defiance. The number “30” became a symbol of resistance, a testament to the enduring power of poetry and memory.
Introducing a Sunday Series from Douglas Murray: Things Worth Remembering | The Free Press (thefp.com)
Apr 26, 2024
Apr 26, 2024 at 12:35 PM UTC
-attributed to Stalin
in a note forbidding the arrest of Boris Pasternak
Stalin and Caesar had no use for dreamers
Stern men of destiny prefer strong tools
To execute their leader’s will, and yet
They cry and beg when they are eventually shot
Cloud-dwellers camouflage themselves with words
And shift their sails but not their souls, and keep
Their little ships on course straight to the stars
Straight on until the dawn they help to light
Courage is in your dreams and words and works
May it please God that Stalin has no use
For you
Apr 6, 2019
Apr 6, 2019 at 4:08 PM UTC
Some Year’s Day
What century is it outside?
-Boris Pasternak
It’s a fair question: what century is this?
There was fog in the morning, this first day
Of the new year, and later overcast
There was nothing new in any of that
The fat grey squirrel raided the bird-seed at dawn
Which is why he is fat, and dampness dripped
From the roof eaves onto the long-dead leaves
There was nothing new in that, either
The first cup of coffee, the same old news -
It’s a fair question, it is: what century?
Jan 28, 2017
Jan 28, 2017 at 3:08 PM UTC
Spring
How many sticky buds, candle ends
sprout from the branches! Steaming
April. Puberty sweats from the park,
and the forest’s blatantly gleaming.
A noose of feathered throats grips
the wood’s larynx, a lassoed steer,
netted, like a gladiatorial *****
it groans steel-piped sonatas here.
Poetry! Be a Greek sponge with suckers,
among green stickiness drenched,
I’ll consent, by the sopping wood
of a green-stained garden bench.
Grow sumptuous pleats and flounces,
**** up the gullies and clouds,
Poetry, tonight, I’ll squeeze you out
to make the parched sheets flower.
Apr 14, 2015
Apr 14, 2015 at 6:38 PM UTC