To Urania
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky 1940 ( Leningrad, RSFSR) – 1996 (New York City, New York)
To I.K.
Everything has its limit, including sorrow.
A windowpane stalls a stare. Nor does a grill abandon
a leaf. One may rattle the keys, gurgle down a swallow.
Loneless cubes a man at random.
A camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril;
a perspective cuts emptiness deep and even.
And what is space anyway if not the
body's absence at every given
point? That's why Urania's older sister Clio!
in daylight or with the soot-rich lantern,
you see the globe's pate free of any bio,
you see she hides nothing, unlike the latter.
There they are, blueberry-laden forests,
rivers where the folk with bare hands catch sturgeon
or the towns in whose soggy phone books
you are starring no longer; father eastward surge on
brown mountain ranges; wild mares carousing
in tall sedge; the cheeckbones get yellower
as they turn numerous. And still farther east, steam dreadnoughts
or cruisers,
and the expanse grows blue like lace underwear.
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Submitted on June 22, 2016
Modified on March 23, 2023
- 49 sec read
- 81 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABCBDEFGCBHBIJCKLAIJMN |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,150 |
Words | 161 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 22 |
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"To Urania" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 7 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/44891/to-urania>.
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