Boris Pasternak

A cloud-dweller I am, unharmed, according to
the tyrant with a fat cockroach for his mustache.
But my boots get soiled in the slushy mud,
and harm is rightly spelt in my anxiety.

Everyday I see the sun up with new threats
and down with its success stories of intimidation.
Every night the moon does a nurse’s duty
with its silver-tinged ointment to rub on wounds,

but they are obstinate, refusing to be cured.
I think this cycle will continue before I’m
reported dead. If I get to the very bottom of it,
I’m sad because sadness cannot be news anymore.

I must say I’m not unlike an unhinged window
of a vacant house with cold air-currents coming in.
I’m wintered-out, dreaming to be summering
like 20-somethings with unbridled emotions.

Keeping all of what I have inside in check freezes
the warmth of keeping them. At Peredelkino,
I look at furrows in the snow as if Pushkin’s
sprightly lines denying the cold, yet the more

I look out the more I think of a shivering rat
that sneaked into my cabin for shelter, running
from the wild wind spying over Siberia. I feel
good about that little grace. I listen to the wind’s

notes as poems whose fire I loved to rekindle
against the frost of everything now threatens
to grill me as if with a skewer. But I won’t be
surprised if the world might say I was unharmed.

Sofiul Azam has three published poetry collections Impasse (2003), In Love with a Gorgon (2010), Safe under Water (2014) and edited Short Stories of Selim Morshed (2009). His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Pirene's Fountain, North Dakota Quarterly, The Ibis Head Review, The Ghazal Page, Cholla Needles, Poetry Salzburg Review, Orbis, The Cannon’s Mouth, Postcolonial Text, and elsewhere. Some poems are anthologized in Two Thirds North, fourW: New Writing 28, Journeys, Caught in the Net among others. His fourth poetry collection Persecution is forthcoming. He currently teaches English at World University of Bangladesh.