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Joseph Brodsky, You Were Wrong
"Sky looks better without them."
---Joseph Brodsky, "As For The Stars"
Your poem is wrong, Joseph Brodsky---
no sky looks better without them.
Their absence would mean the universe
has become so diffuse that even their light
can no longer reach us ---and that would be
a terrible sense of loneliness.
The stars preceded us in the order of
Creation. From certain elements they have
fused from hydrogen in their seething cores,
our flesh is constituted. Their presence,
in skies that would be, otherwise, blank is
apt metaphor of our own souls present
within our own bodies that would be, otherwise,
unconscious, unaware, and unfeeling.
No sky looks better without the stars upon it.
No flesh lives better without a soul within it.
Your poem is wrong, Joseph Brodsky---
but if the only star in your sky was Soviet Red,
one can comprehend what the written poem has said.
Starward
