Final Faith

Is it possible that we are so twisted there is no salvation for any of us, and that ideas have become wingless in an age of winged rockets? Is it possible that a crippled birch, bending over to the last river, will see the last man in its boiling water? Is it possible there’ll be no Big Ben, Saint Basil’s, or Notre Dame and that neutron foam will gush over our final steps? But that planet, cherry trees, birds, and children will perish, I don’t believe. This disbelief is my final faith. Skull after skull will not be piled up in towers again. The final Nuremberg approaches us before, not after the war. And the last soldier on earth will throw his shoulder strap in a stream, and watch how peacefully dragonflies sit on it. All rascality will end. All people will understand-we are a family. The last government will abolish itself. The last exploiter, opening his toothless mouth, will gobble the last money furtively like a delicacy. The last cowardly editor will be doomed forever to read from the stage in sequence everything that he destroyed. So that the last bureaucrat can rest and be silent, his gullet will be stuffed in payment with the last rubber stamp. And the earth will turn without fear of the last years, there never will be born the last great poet.