One poem by Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky (Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky) was a Russian poet and English essayist of Jewish heritage. His poetry was deemed not sufficiently in tune with the ideological demands of the Soviet authorities, and he suffered a public trial where he was declared a “social parasite.”  Sentenced to four years of hard labor he was let go in a year and a half after leading poets including Anna Akhmatova demanded he be freed.  Akhmatova was a long-time mentor of Brodsky who in 1972 was sent in exile that resulted in his coming to the US where he taught at a number of colleges and universities, including primarily Michigan and Mount Holyoke College. Brodsky won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as the United States Poet Laureate in 1991. Brodsky is widely considered the greatest Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century.

TO ANNA ANDREEVNA AKHMATOVA                                                                                                       
At the borders past fences

Past crosses of barbed zinc stars

Past seven seven hundred latches 

 
And not only past foreboding miles

But past every crane salute     

And steppe unploughed grassland  

Past Russia as though not soaked

Neither with tears nor with my blood.

Hugging the road not taken

My youth trembles in the wind

Somewhere near the cold Motherland

He lies past the Finland Station.

I peer into threatened unknowns

Already rigid with pain

As though these nameless terrors

Cleave not only in someone’s soul.