Writings and translations

The eternal question

Explorers of space asked me this question:
'Is the adventure worth the obsession?
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.'

Off the shelve I took an old book,
Whose wisdom had been overlooked:
"Generations come, generations go" -
Major Biblical answers still hold.
Ecclesiastes wrote "omnia vanitas"
Sipping same wine from his glass.

Pavel Kiparisov