Writings and translations

The eternal question

Explorers of space asked me these questions:
'Is the adventure worth the obsessions?
Or love of your wife and father's advice
Is what you've been looking for in your life?

How to live honest, not fall into vanity,
Reach stars and not lose the humanity?
Man needs man, not a scrape of metal,
Not useless toys but love and a saddle,
A horse and freedom to roam earthly steppes,
And roads to follow one's ancentor's steps.

We're at the most distant corners of space,
We tamed the atom with its quantum state,
We pushed the limits of what one can do,
But was it really a plan to go through?

Here we are at Proxima Centauri
Looking at skies, dark and starry
With elusive hope to see our Sun --
The way home has been long gone.

So we raise our children, we grow our grapes,
We have wineyards and watch older tapes
With pictures of Earth that are fading away,
We love, we live, and we pray.'

I took from the shelve an old book,
"Generations come, generations go" -
Major Biblical answers still hold.
Ecclesiastes once said "omnia vanitas"
Pouring old wine in his millenia glass.
But the answers seem to be overlooked.

Pavel Kiparisov