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Two poems for Christmas by Joseph Brodsky
Star of the Nativity and Nativity Poem
Star of the Nativity
In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than
to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,
a child was born in a cave in order to save the world;
it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart.
To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam
out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team
of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar.
He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.
Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray
clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away—
from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star
was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare.
Nativity Poem
Imagine striking a match that night in the cave:
Imagine crockery, try to make use of its glaze
To feel cold cracks in the floor, the blankness of hunger.
Imagine the desert—but the desert is everywhere.
Imagine striking a match in that midnight cave,
The fire, the farm beasts in outline, the farm tools and stuff;
And imagine, as you towel your face in the enveloping folds,
Mary, Joseph, and the Infant in swaddling clothes.
Imagine the kings, the caravans’ stilted procession
As they make for the cave, or, rather, three beams closing in
And in on the star, the creaking of loads, the clink of a cowbell;
(No thronging of Heaven as yet, no peal of the bell
That will ring in the end for the infant once he has earned it).
Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded
Immensely in distance, recognizing Himself in the Son
Of Man: His homelessness plain to him now in a homeless one.
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was a Russian poet who settled in America after being exiled by the Soviet regime. The Leningrad native had long defied the Communist stranglehold on Russia. Like fellow Russian exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky fled to America and settled in Ann Arbor, MI, before taking up teaching positions at Yale, Columbia, Cambridge and the University of Michigan. In 1987, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1991 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. While he considered himself only “a Christian by correspondence,” Brodsky wrote a poem every year for Christmas. “What is remarkable about Christmas?” he once asked. “The fact that what we’re dealing with here is the calculation of life — or, at the very least, existence — in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual.”
Here's something you might be interested in.
Two poems for Christmas by Joseph Brodsky
Star of the Nativity and Nativity Poem
Two poems for Christmas by Joseph Brodsky
Star of the Nativity and Nativity Poem
Star of the Nativity
In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than
to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,
a child was born in a cave in order to save the world;
it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart.
To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam
out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team
of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar.
He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.
Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray
clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away—
from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star
was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare.
Nativity Poem
Imagine striking a match that night in the cave:
Imagine crockery, try to make use of its glaze
To feel cold cracks in the floor, the blankness of hunger.
Imagine the desert—but the desert is everywhere.
Imagine striking a match in that midnight cave,
The fire, the farm beasts in outline, the farm tools and stuff;
And imagine, as you towel your face in the enveloping folds,
Mary, Joseph, and the Infant in swaddling clothes.
Imagine the kings, the caravans’ stilted procession
As they make for the cave, or, rather, three beams closing in
And in on the star, the creaking of loads, the clink of a cowbell;
(No thronging of Heaven as yet, no peal of the bell
That will ring in the end for the infant once he has earned it).
Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded
Immensely in distance, recognizing Himself in the Son
Of Man: His homelessness plain to him now in a homeless one.
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was a Russian poet who settled in America after being exiled by the Soviet regime. The Leningrad native had long defied the Communist stranglehold on Russia. Like fellow Russian exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky fled to America and settled in Ann Arbor, MI, before taking up teaching positions at Yale, Columbia, Cambridge and the University of Michigan. In 1987, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1991 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. While he considered himself only “a Christian by correspondence,” Brodsky wrote a poem every year for Christmas. “What is remarkable about Christmas?” he once asked. “The fact that what we’re dealing with here is the calculation of life — or, at the very least, existence — in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual.”
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