We live in a gloomy time of growing anxiety and diminished expectations, though for many much goes on as before. This Brodsky poem is more than a dozen years old, but resonates these days more than ever, even as we forget the specific era in which this first appeared.
Lousy times: nothing to steal and no one to steal from.
The legions return empty-handed from their faraway expeditions.
A sybil confuses the past with the future as if she were a tree.
And actors whom nobody now applauds
forget the great lines. Forgetting, however, is the mother
of classics. Eventually these years
too will be seen as a slab of marble
with a network of capillaries (the aqueduct, the system
of taxation, the catacombs, the gossip),
with a tuft of grass bursting up from within its crack.
Whereas this was a time of poverty and of boredom,
when there was nothing to steal, still less to buy,
not to mention to offer somebody as a present.
The fault was not Caesar’s, more suffering than the rest
because of the absence of luxury. Nor should one blame the stars,
since the low overcast relieves the planets of responsibility
toward the settled terrain: an absence
cannot influence a presence. And here’s precisely where
a marble slab starts, because one-sidedness
is the enemy of perspective. Perhaps it’s simply
that things, more quickly than men, have lost
their desire to multiply. In this white captivity.
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