Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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THE STING OF CONSCIENCE

You have written, Greene, in your last book

The reasons why I so hate milk.

You have diagnosed the war in my own gut

Against the innocence, yes, against the dead mother

Who became, some twenty years ago,

My famous refuge.

This one place that claims to know peace,

This is the very den

Where most damage is planned and done.

O, there are quiet ones among us

And I live with the quietest of all.

Here we are, victims, making all the trouble

Loving the pity and the ignorance

With which the light stands firm

On our most righteous candlestick.

And now your book has come

To plague the hapless conscience of the just

While war boils in my own hard-praying heart.

Not out of charity,

Rather out of idleness do we refuse to hate.

O, if I were less desperately meek

And could win back some malice, once again

And tell the people what I mean

I would perhaps hate them less

For having so loved me.

I know: the decision is fatally made.

I shall never return. I cannot reach again

Those dear bad shores, to which prolific life