…………………………………………………………To Elisabeth Leonskaya
The air—fierce frost and pine-boughs.
We’ll cram ourselves in thick clothes,
stumbling in drifts till we’re weary—
better a reindeer than a dromedary.
In the North if faith does not fail
God appears as the warden of a jail
where the kicks in our ribs were rough
but what you hear is “They didn’t get enough.”
In the South the white stuff’s a rare sight,
they love Christ who was also in flight,
desert-born, sand and straw his welcome,
he died, so they say, far from home.
So today, commemorate with wine and bread,
a life with just the sky’s roof overhead
because up there a man escapes
the arresting earth—plus there’s more space.
Psst: Little Star will host a reading at AWP with Derek Walcott and his former students Glyn Maxwell and Melissa Green on the theme of the poet as teacher. Translations of Brodsky by Maxwell and Green also appear in Nativity Poems.