A speck of insanity?

Your conscience?

Life’s knot, where we’re known and tied

and untied into existence.

So honest spider-beams spinning

cathedrals of super-life crystals

onto ribs, gather them again

to a single bunch.

Grateful bundles of clean lines,

all collected by thin beams,

gathering together, sometime,

like guests with open faces.

But only here on earth, not in the sky,

like in a house filled with music –

just don’t frighten them, don’t wound them – please –

let us live to see that, let us live to see.

Forgive me this as I say it,

read it back to me, quietly, quietly.

(Voronezh, 15 March 1937)