Reading at Dawn, Pondering the World’s Evil by Yongbo Ma

 

Image | SYVETS Productions

Reading at Dawn, Pondering the World’s Evil

 

The room remains cold—no crackling stove,
no hum of hot water cycling through pipes
to drown Augustine’s ancient admonition:
Evil is the misuse of free will.
I mutter: Insomnia is not my choice.
I sleep in my abyss; the abyss stays awake.

 

Then Leibniz flares into view,
his head emerging sharp from atoms,
declaring divine order governs the world.
Evil, he claims, is but a partial view—
a fragment of the good, unfinished.
As he finishes, my son turns away,
dodging the lamp’s rude fingers like a fish.
Yet from the dark universe before dawn,
my window, the size of a skull,
casts rough, warm grains of light for early walkers.

 

Gloomy Berdyaev speaks from the wilderness,
surrounded by stones, sheep, and snowflakes:
Evil’s essence is the inversion of orders—
a cartoon of being, elevating the low,
as frost layered over snow,
as poetry placed above life,
as me, confusing night and day, reading, and vanishing.

 

So I close the book,

outside, a winter is fading.

 

© Yongbo Ma

Yongbo Ma

Yongbo Ma was born in 1964. He has a PhD and is a translator, editor, and leading scholar of postmodern poetry. He has authored or translated more than 80 published books. Ma is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Literature at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. His translations from English include works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, W.C.Williams, John Ashbery, Herman Melville, and others. You can follow him on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093276516900.

Follow Feed the Holy