Sergey Dobrenkov Poet Ode

The Sole Switch

Behind the glass a painted sorrow gleams;
The eyebrow lifts on cue, the voice is torn;
Indignant tears arrive in practiced streams,
And outrage ships out fresh with every morn.

What passes here for honest human speech
Is counterfeit, stamped smooth to pass as true;
Each hired tongue commands a market's reach,
Each face a sum some quiet ledger knew.

So once a mouth was rented in the dark
For thirty pieces, silver counted twice;
It laid a kiss upon a sacred mark
And gave betrayal the plain name of price.

No need to learn the forger's hidden name—
The old transaction wears a thousand faces;
The silver rings the same in every frame,
And Judas keeps his chair in all the places.

Incited hatred swells to crowd the square,
A cry rehearsed and shouted countless times;
And soon it comes to Pilate's borrowed chair,
Who washes clean his hands of others' crimes.

I will not owe my silence to their pay,
Nor lend my grief to what the ledger sells;
Let others learn the lines the sponsors say—
My unbought heart still rings its own true bells.

And when the dark is loudest, thick with lies,
My hand still finds the sole switch left to press;
The screen goes black, and dumb before my eyes
Falls every scripted grief, each hired distress.

Yet silence only empties out the air;
I go to seek the wild, unquiet shore,
I lift my hands, and turn instead to prayer,
Where breakers speak a truth the screens ignore—

That restless sea, unmasked in its despair,
Speaks truer than the sea of human lies;
While high above, untroubled by affair,
The changeless stars keep God's unshaken skies.

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