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Brodsky,
Joseph
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Soviet-Russian-American poet and essayist. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 for alleged "social parasitism" and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed American Poet Laureate in 1991.. Russian poet and essayist
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Letter to an Archaeologist
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Written by:
Joseph
Brodsky
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Citizen enemy mama's boy sucker utter
garbage panhandler swine refujew verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes we have dwelt here: in this concrete brick wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed barbed tangled or interwoven.
Also: we didn't love our women but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron
still it's gentler that what we've been told or
have said ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells
Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels
consonants and so forth: they won't resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces feces and barks and barks.
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