for Joseph Brodsky
sentenced by Russian government in 1965
to five years of exiled farm labor for
“parasitism.”
Bureaucracy craves to fish in muddy waters
of generalities. Nets so wide and tight-meshed
no gentle organism swims safe, free to wander
into warm, clear sea and grow, take chances,
or merely lie on ocean bottom, gaze up and ponder
beams of light dancing across bright, dazzling surface.
What happened when they tossed you on the cold
slick wood floor? Did you flop and gasp for air
inside, while to their intestine-colored
eyes you seemed stiff as bone hurled from some lair
in Siberian snow? I see you glow,
inner fire showing only God is fair
enough to judge you. The free man within you spits
out hooks of their rusted words. Your bloody mouth shouts,
“Let’s get specific! Drop your hammer-and-sickle
psychology! Call me some solid name! I doubt
you have it in you! Am I a leech? Did I stick
to you with dual suckers? Can’t you pull me out?
You’ve got it wrong, tyrants. I don’t gnaw flesh.
It’s hard shell around your spirit I crack
with my verses. Hear it? Feel spewing fresh
images of love sear your ulcered back-
bone, freeing childhood dreams you thought had flecked
off like scales of dead memory? Dark shacks
where you heave our minds as rewards for staying silent
can’t stand against this blaze you fear is hate.
I wonder. Will your frozen hands ever touch or sense
the way we burn inside? How this flame motivates
us to stand? Will you hear sorrowing violins?
Learn to live the way we learned from Akhmatova?”
Roger Armbrust
