Reading Brodsky…
Reading Brodsky…
I’m reading Brodsky, days in me
Are mixed with nights. My hands are cold…
And with the utmost eagerness I hold
Right at my lips a cup of burning tea.
My soul is burning like it’s tossed in flames,
As I keep reading, it begins to shiver.
And like from distant isolated river
The words emerge and slowly run through veins.
What is so hurtful and so captivating
About this monologue that’s huge and yet so small?
I hear the voice that stumbling starts to fall;
My mind is blown by rhythms fascinating.
I’m reading Brodsky, reading all my life
In every word I ravel, every line…
You came into my world once like a knife
So please just stay here and forever shine!
Not with a mantra, nor a prayer but with fate
On these entwined and tortured paths
We’re blessed like interwoven halves
That God connected with your words of bate.
I consecrate your traces in my tears,
And of a new messiah name I dream…
I’m reading Brodsky, and his poems seem
To be the only thing I have through all these years.
Just like him, I will write about circles…
After Mikhail Baryshnikov’ s performance in which he read and “danced” 50 poems of his friend Joseph Brodsky. January 22nd 2016, Tel Aviv-Yafo.
He was dancing the poems like others do hearing the music
After crying all night, after thinking the life is condemned…
And the piles of pages were whirling in spirals abusing
All the laws, all the norms in this movement with no seeming end.
And the chair was spinning all covered in makeup and sweat,
You could see all the tendons like there was a mustang on stage…
From his wide-open mouth an occasional wild pirouette
Flew away into space in its silent emotional rage.
The whole audience was on the edge like an old bare wire
They were doomed for short circuit, explosion, irrational fear.
Right in front of them pain in a trembling electric attire
Was performing a sorrowful dance so fragile and sheer.
With his exercised body, and every protuberant muscle
Tel Aviv was enjoying the dance to the poems of ill,
Lonely strangers that long for the life with no usual bustle
Who read poems like music, who fly on the Pegasus’ wings
The remains of tear-stained and defeated benevolent will
On my way I will gather and hold them all close to my heart
We were dancing together to sounds of my own broken thrill
Just like him, I will write about circles and die with my art
About the author:
Viktoria Levina, writes poems, short stories, novels, translate texts from other languages.
Was born on July 23rd 1954 in a family of a military pilot in a city of Chita (Russia). Then her family moved to settle in Ukraine. After graduating high school, she was accepted into Bauman College, started singing chamber music in Moscow student choir. She has been writing ever since I was a child. Lives and publishes her works in Israel since 1997. She is on a jury panel of various international contests. Her main job is aviation industry engineering.
