A Halt in the Desert
So few Greeks live in Leningrad today
that we have razed a Greek church, to make space
for a new concert hall, built oin today's
grim and unhappy style. And yet a con-
cert hall with more than fifteen hundred seats
is not so grim a thing. And who's to blame
if virtuosity has more appeal
than the worn banners of an ancient faith?
Still, it is sad that from this distance now
we see, not the familiar onion domes,
but a grotesquely flattened silhouette.
Yet men are not so heavily in debt
to the grim ugliness of balanced forms
as to the balanced forms of ugliness.
I well remember how the church succumbed.
I was then making frequent springtime calls
at the home of a Tartar family
who lived nearby. From their front window one
could clearly see the outline of the church.
It started in the midst of Tartar talk,
but soon the racket forced its rumbling way
into our conversation, mingling with,
then drowning out, our steady human speech.
A huge power shovel clanked up to the church,
an iron ball dangling from its boom, and soon
the walls began to give way peaceably.
Not to give way would be ridiculous
for a mere wall in face of such a foe.
Moreover, the power shovel may have thought
the wall a dead and soulless thing and thus,
to a degree, like its own self. And in
the universe of dead and soulless things
resistance is regarded as bad form.
Next came the dump trucks, then the bulldozers . . .
So, in the end, I sat — late that same thing —
among the fresh ruins in church's apse.
Night yawned behind the altar's gaping holes.
And through those open altar wounds I watched
retreating streetcars as they slowly swam
past phalanxes of deathly pale streetlamaps.
I saw now through the prism of that church
a swarm of things that churches do not show.
Some day, when we who now live are no more,
or rather after we have been, there will
spring up in what was once our space
a thing of such a kind as will bring fear,
a panic fear, to those who knew us best.
But those who knew us will be very few.
The dogs, moved by old memory, still lift
their hindlegs at a once familiar spot.
The church's walls have long since been torn down,
but these dogs see the church walls in their dreams —
dog-dreams have cancelled out reality.
Perhaps the earth still holds that ancient smell:
asphalt can't cover up what a dog sniffs.
What can this building be to such as dogs!
For them the church still stands; they see it plain.
And what to people is a patent fact
leaves them entirely cold. This quality
is sometimes called 'a dog's fidelity'.
And, if I were to speak in earnest of
the 'relay face of human history',
I'd swear by nothing but this relay race—
this face of all the generations who
have sniffed, and who will sniff, the ancient smells.
So few Greeks live in Leningrad today,
outside of Greece, in general, so few—
too few to save the buildings of the faith.
And to have faith in buildings — none asks that.
It is one thing to bring a folk to Christ;
to bear His cross is something else again.
Their duty was a single thing and clear,
but they lacked strength to live that duty whole.
Their unploughed fields grew thick with vagrant weeds.
'Thou who doest sow, keep they sharp plough at hand
and we shall tell thee when they grain is ripe.'
They failed to keep their sharp ploughs close at hand.
Tonight I stare out through the black windows
and think about that point to which we've come,
and then I ask myself: from which are we
now more remote — the world of ancient Greece,
or Orthodoxy? Which is closer now?
What lies ahead? Does a new epoch wait
for us? And, if it does, what duty do we owe? —
What sacrifices must we make for it?
Joseph Brodsky. in
Selected Poems. George L. Kline (trad). Harper & Row (1973)
