Transatlantic — National Poetry Month

Transatlantic

The last twenty years were good for practically everybody

save the dead. But maybe for them as well.

Maybe the Almighty Himself has turned a bit bourgeois

and uses a credit card. For otherwise time’s passage

makes no sense. Hence memories, recollections,

values, deportment. One hopes one hasn’t

spent one’s mother or father or both, or a handful of friends entirely

as they cease to hound one’s dreams. One’s dreams,

unlike the city, become less populous

the older one gets. That’s why the eternal rest

cancels analysis. The last twenty years were good

for practically everybody and constituted

the afterlife for the dead. Its quality could be questioned

but not its duration. The dead, one assumes, would not

mind attaining a homeless status, and sleep in archways

or watch pregnant submarines returning

to their native pen after a worldwide journey

without destroying life on earth, without

even a proper flag to hoist.

                                                                                                                         

By Joseph Brodsky

from Collected Poems in English, 1972-1999
courtesy Poetry Foundation