ivan walks away

My confession, dear Alyosha, is this:
I broke into quiet tears after
reading the Inquisitor's poem come to an end:
Ivan turning on his low-slung
right shoulder, pivoting

on a fractured limb,

a dove falling from the air
twirling on the severed
bloody stub of its wing,
blasted by a wounded little boy.

(My poor father, my poor father,
there's your money, THERE'S YOUR MONEY

and there, there alone, there's your freedom:

200 red rubles

balled up in the mud)

Where Ivan walks, no hand

to hold him; no extended arm.

No counterbalance for the weight

of the ears carelessly nailed to fence-posts

or girl left alone in the outhouse

all night to freeze.

His look is too familiar, Alyosha,

too familiar to me, like driving away from home

the last time it's still home.
I wish I could dissolve with you.

miracles

"It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles." - Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear trans.)

vile

"I may be vile, but you must not be."

- Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. by Pevear & Volokhonsky