December 24, 1971 by Joseph Brodsky read by A Poetry Channel

Описание: Merry Xmas Eve, everyone! Brodsky, a Soviet-born poet who later settled in the United States and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, is a poet with a dazzling command of the formal aspects of verse; his use of slant rhyme is particularly admired. Brodsky wrote a number of Christmas poems during his career and I thought I'd share this wry cynical yet ultimately beautiful musing on the day. My name is Lori. If you enjoy my readings and would like to show your support, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com/lorigomez_ap...

December 24, 1971
By Joseph Brodsky
For V.S.

When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi.
At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing.
Where a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored,
is the cause of a human assault-wave
by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:
each one his own king, his own camel.

Nylon bags, carrier bags, paper cones,
caps and neckties all twisted up sideways.
Reek of vodka and resin and cod,
orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.
Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway
toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.

And the bearers of moderate gifts
leap on buses and jam all the doorways,
disappear into courtyards that gape,
though they know that there’s nothing inside there:
not a beast, not a crib, nor yet her,
round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.

Emptiness. But the mere thought of that
brings forth lights as if out of nowhere.
Herod reigns but the stronger he is,
the more sure, the more certain the wonder.
In the constancy of this relation
is the basic mechanics of Christmas.

That’s what they celebrate everywhere,
for its coming push tables together.
No demand for a star for a while,
but a sort of good will touched with grace
can be seen in all men from afar,
and the shepherds have kindled their fires.

Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding
chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.
Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child.
He who comes is a mystery: features
are not known beforehand, men’s hearts may
not be quick to distinguish the stranger.

But when drafts through the doorway disperse
the thick mist of the hours of darkness
and a shape in a shawl stands revealed,
both a newborn and Spirit that’s Holy
in your self you discover; you stare
skyward, and it’s right there:
a star.

Brodsky wrote this poem during a period of great uncertainty in his life. As both an individualistic poet and a Jewish man, Brodsky had been persecuted by the Soviet authorities for almost a decade; he’d been sentenced to hard labor in the Arctic, institutionalized for fraudulently-diagnosed mental illness, and barred from traveling freely in his own country. By Christmas Eve in 1971, Brodsky was a candidate for exile from the Soviet Union. If the “magi” of his poem seem to wander aimlessly, it is only because Brodsky himself could not be sure where he’d be going, either. Yet there was hope for Brodsky in 1972: his situation drew the sympathy of the Western literary establishment, and the poet W. H. Auden in particular helped to settle Brodsky in the United States. At the time of composition, the prospect of safety and security may have seemed distant.

Poet, translator, essayist, and playwright Iosif Alexandrovich Brodsky was reviled and persecuted by officials in his native Soviet Union while the Western literary establishment lauded him as one of the finest poets working in the Russian language. From the time he began publishing poetry, both under his own name and under the anglicized name Joseph Brodsky, he aroused the ire of Soviet authorities, which was compounded by the anti-Semitic persecution he faced because of his Jewish ancestry.

Brodsky was born in Leningrad, Soviet Union, now Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a Russian Jewish family. Brodsky quit school at 15 and embarked on a self-directed education, reading literary classics and taking a variety of unusual jobs, including assisting a coroner and working as a geologist’s assistant in Central Asia. He learned English and Polish so he could translate the poems ofJohn Donne andCzeslaw Milosz. Brodsky’s poetry, completely banned in his home country for most of his life, bears the marks of his confrontations with the Russian authorities. The vendetta against Brodsky first came to a head in a Leningrad trial in 1964 because of which he was sentenced to five years of hard labor. Protests from artists and writers led byAnna Akhmatova shortly before her death helped secure his release after 18 months, but his poetry was still banned. In 1972 , banned from the USSR he moved to Michigan, where, with the help of the poet W.H. Auden, he settled in at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as poet-in-residence. Brodsky then taught at several universities, including Queens College in New York City and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He continued to write poetry, often writing in Russian and translating his work into English.

#poetry #poem #christmas