Jack Pelham

He asked them whether he had
Become their enemy by telling them the truth,
And I don’t know if I’ve ever heard
A bombshell of a question packed
With more implications than that.

To his dying breath
He will curse the wickedness of the tyrants—
His veins bulging, and beet-red in the face—
Thundering away at their transgressions
And calling down the fires of perdition
On their damnable heads.

God will know how to judge us fairly.
And those of us who desire a fair judgment—
And who think him wise—
Will be satisfied with that.

And the rest,
Not so much.

The young man wonders
What’s worth doing
With his life—
Which is quite the grand question
And well worth pondering.

And people are free to
Change their answer
From time to time.

And then one day
She came to life again.

I’ll never know what really happened,
But it was as if she had simply
Decided to be happy.

I do not know which I would prefer—
That in heaven, we should be
Instantly made aware of all knowledge,
Or that we might be left alone
To finish studying by ourselves.

The one seems as fantastic as the other.

When they first set off the bomb,
They were not completely certain
That the chain reaction would stop
Before it had destroyed the whole world.
But they gave it a whirl, and we may now infer,
By the facts that I have sat here writing this
And that you are sitting there reading it,
That their explosion did indeed
Have its natural limits.

If Satan were gone,
We could then discover
Whether man were capable
Of carrying on the wickedness
Previously learned from that master
While left to his own devices
In his own place and time
And under his own
Power and will.

He gave her a book, she says
But she wouldn’t read it—
Not really.

She was some afraid
She might not like
What it said.

But mostly, she
Just didn’t care
That much.

And it was easier
Anyway to pretend
That she already knew
What it said
And loved it.

If we are determined to have an elected king,
Then might we not elect a righteous one
From time to time—even by accident?

This is the desperate hope of a society that
Will not study itself into agreement
On the definition of righteousness.

It hopes that it will do better
Than its own philosophy
And behavior deserve—
The other guy being
Always the problem.