"brodsky" poems
From nowhere with love, on the teenth of martober.
Dear madam, my darling, my sweet- but of no
Importance that is. For your features no longer,
To tell the truth, can be remembered. Not yours,
Yet no one's best friend. I salute you from one of
Five continents, which rests on the cowboys. Then
I loved you more than angles, and even "Omni...",
Hence, farther I am from you than- both of them.
Far away, late at night, at the bottom of valley,
In the town, where snow reaches the doorknob. I ,
Upon the sheet wringling, at least not as may be
Described somewhere in the further line,
I fluff up the pillow with "you" in a murmur,
Over the mountains, which have no bounds or end,
In the darkness, with the entire body, all your
Features, as would a crazy mirrow, I recreate.
Dec 12, 2017
Dec 12, 2017 at 12:03 PM UTC
As you pour yourself a scotch
Crush a roach or check your watch
As your hands adjust your tie people die
In the towns with funny names
Hit by bullets, caught in flames
By and large not knowing why people die.
Joseph Brodsky
Jan 25, 2013
Jan 25, 2013 at 1:16 PM UTC
I said fate plays a game without a score,
and who needs fish if you've got caviar?
The triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass
and turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.
I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.
When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often.
I said the forest's only part of a tree.
Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?
Sick of the dust raised by the modern era,
the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire.
I sit by the window. The dishes are done.
I was happy here. But I won't be again.
I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,
and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-
o Euclid thought the vanishing point became
wasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit.
I said that the leaf may destory the bud;
what's fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud;
that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain
nature spills the seeds of trees in vain.
I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees.
My heavy shadow's my squat company.
My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked,
but at least no chorus can ever sing it back.
That talk like this reaps no reward bewilders
no one--no one's legs rest on my sholders.
I sit by the window in the dark. Like an express,
the waves behind the wavelike curtain crash.
A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.
Anonymous Submission
Joseph Brodsky
Jan 24, 2013
Jan 24, 2013 at 6:56 PM UTC
Citizen, enemy, mama's boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn't love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it's gentler than what we've been told or have said ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won't resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.
Joseph Brodsky
Jan 25, 2013
Jan 25, 2013 at 1:13 PM UTC
I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
the handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin-bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.
I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car,
and you'd shift the gear.
we'd find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we'd repair
To where we've been before.
I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear,
when the moon skims the water
that sighs and shifts in its slumber.
I wish it were still a quarter
to dial your number.
I wish you were here, dear,
in this hemisphere,
as I sit on the porch
sipping a beer.
It's evening, the sun is setting;
boys shout and gulls are crying.
What's the point of forgetting
If it's followed by dying?
Joseph Brodsky
Jan 24, 2013
Jan 24, 2013 at 6:56 PM UTC
About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of the battle,
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings
from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade
- wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of state
bad blood.
Now the place is abuzz with trading
in your ankles's remnants, bronzes
of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises,
rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason,
laundered banners with imprints of the many
who since have risen.
All's overgrown with people. A ruin's a rather stubborn
architectural style. And the hearts's distinction
from a pitch-black cavern
isn't that great; not great enough to fear
that we may collide again like blind eggs somewhere.
At sunrise, when nobody stares at one's face, I often,
set out on foot to a monument cast in molten
lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth "commander
in chief." But it reads "in grief," or "in brief,"
or "in going under."
Joseph Brodsky
Jan 24, 2013
Jan 24, 2013 at 6:52 PM UTC
The stone-built villages of England.
A cathedral bottled in a pub window.
Cows dispersed across fields.
Monuments to kings.
A man in a moth-eaten suit
sees a train off, heading, like everything here, for the sea,
smiles at his daughter, leaving for the East.
A whistle blows.
And the endless sky over the tiles
grows bluer as swelling birdsong fills.
And the clearer the song is heard,
the smaller the bird.
Joseph Brodsky
Jan 25, 2013
Jan 25, 2013 at 1:15 PM UTC
I’m not a son or a grandson. I’ll say
Politely: I have not memories’ ton!
Only my soul is sad night and day
That our beloved poet is gone!
In New York he left at the dawn of years—
In January it was snowing hard.
I read his books of poetry and prose
From cover to cover for the mind.
I know even his number of phone
And his home address for writing.
But I’m afraid very much of bad form,
There’ll be no one letters reading.
His memory’ll be memorized, I believe,
So that the text in bronze runs
On home: “Never be sad, people, time treats grief,
Joseph Brodsky lived here, this memorize!”
{2020}
К 80-ЛЕТИЮ ИОСИФА БРОДСКОГО
Я не сын, не внук. Скажу учтиво:
У меня воспоминаний нет!
Только где-то на душе тоскливо,
Что ушёл любимый наш поэт!
На рассвете лет ушёл в Нью-Йорке -
Снег тогда январский сильно мёл.
Книги все его от корки к корке
Я стихов и прозы перечёл.
Знаю даже номер телефона,
Адрес дома – чтобы написать.
Но боюсь я очень моветона –
Будет письма некому читать.
Память – верю я – увековечат.
В бронзе текст на доме чтоб гласил:
«Не грустите, люди! Время лечит!
Здесь Иосиф Бродский раньше жил!»
{14.05.2020}
Translator - I. Toporov
May 18, 2020
May 18, 2020 at 9:11 AM UTC
M.B.
I threw my arms about those shoulders, glancing
at what emerged behind that back,
and saw a chair pusher slightly forward,
merging now with the lighted wall.
The lamp glared too bright to show
the shabby furniture to some advantage,
and that is why sofa of brown leather
shone a sort of yellow in a corner.
The table looked bare, the parquet glossy,
the stove quite dark, and in a dusty frame
a landscape did not stir. Only the sideboart
seemed to me to have some animation.
But a moth flitted round the room,
causing my arrested glance to shift;
and if at any time a ghost had lived here,
he now was gone, abandoning this house.
Joseph Brodsky
Jan 25, 2013
Jan 25, 2013 at 1:09 PM UTC
Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected]
“Anglo-Saxon Students Would Not Like to Be Taught by a Jew”
cited in
-Stanley Kunitz Lyrics, Songs, and Albums | Genius
To the Privileged Youth of Columbia University:
As a child of situational poverty
I am so grateful for all my Jewish teachers
Including
Moses
Joshua
Jeremiah
Samuel
David
Solomon
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
Saint Peter and the others in The Twelve
Saint Paul
Elie Weisel
Chaim Potok
Herman Wouk
Leon Uris
Franz Kafka
Leonard Cohen
Anne Frank
Bernard Malamud
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Philip Roth
Osip Mandelstam
Saul Bellow
Isaac Asimov
Woody Allen
Mel Brooks
Edna Ferber
Yip Harburg
George Cukor
Mel Brooks
Oscar Hammerstein
Alan Lerner
Carl Reiner
Rod Serling
Franz Werfel
Alan Arkin
Claire Bloom
Leonard Nimoy
Chaim Topol
Ed Asner
Mel Brooks
Peter Falk
Werner Klemperer
Jack Klugman
Walter Matthau
Tony Randall
Mel Torme
John Banner
Kirk Douglas
Lorne Greene
Eli Wallach
Sam Wanamaker
Morey Amsterdam
Leo Genn
Otto Preminger
Jack Benny
Leslie Howard
Ernst Lubitsch
Cecil B. DeMille
Mortimer Adler
Allen Bloom
Harold Bloom
Irving Berlin
Boris Pasternak
Emil Ludwig
Eric Wolfgang Korngold
Elmer Bernstein
Max Steiner
George Gershwin
Dimitri Tiomkin
Samuel Fuller
Alexander Korda
Zoltan Korda
Emeric Pressburger
Erich von Stroheim
Billy Wilder
William Wyler
Fred Zinnemann
J. J. Abrams
Peter Bogdanovich
Michael Curtiz
Stanley Donen
Stanley Kramer
Howard Caine
Leon Askin
Robert Clary
Dinah Shore
Stephen Sondheim
Volodymyr Zelinsky
Simon Schama
Louise Gluck
Siegfried Sassoon
Isaac Rosenberg
Joseph Brodsky
Rob Morrow
Vasily Grossman
Stanley Kubrick
Viktor Frankl
And more, so many more, a cloud of witnesses
Whose names are written in gold on a scroll in Heaven
But somehow, in this world of beauty and truth
And humanity’s aspirations to the good
All you have found are bullhorns, trash fires, chants
Clinched fists, obscenities, lies, and shrieking hate
Apr 19, 2024
Apr 19, 2024 at 12:12 PM UTC