JOSEPH BRODSKY
Imagine striking a match that night in the cave:
Imagine crockery, try to make use of its glaze
To feel cold cracks in the floor, the blankness of hunger.
Imagine the desert—but the desert is everywhere.
Imagine striking a match in that midnight cave,
The fire, the farm beasts in outline, the farm tools and stuff;
And imagine, as you towel your face in enveloping folds,
Mary, Joseph, and the Infant in swaddling clothes.
Imagine the kings, the caravans’ stilted procession
As they make for the cave, or, rather, three beams closing in
And in on the star; the creaking of loads, the clink of a cowbell;
(No thronging of Heaven as yet, no peal of the bell
That will ring in the end for the Infant once he has earned it).
Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded
Immensely in distance, recognizing Himself in the Son
Of Man: His homelessness plain to him now in a homeless one.
(Translated, from the Russian, by Seamus Heaney)
2000