Jackson Browne "Before the Deluge” – Downstream 2021-"After us" (Joseph Brodsky)

 

 

 

And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge

Let the music keep our spirits high
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

 

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

 

 

After Us, By Joseph Brodsky

After us, it is certainly not the flood,

and not drought either. In all likelihood, the climate

in the Kingdom of Justice, with its four seasons, will

be temperate, so that a choleric, a melancholic,

a sanguinic, and a phlegmatic could rule by turns

three months each. From the standpoint of an encyclopedia,

that’s plenty. Although, no doubt, caprices

of atmospheric pressure or those of temperature

might confuse a reformer. Still, the god of commerce

only revels in a rising demand for tweeds,

English umbrellas, worsted topcoats. His most dreaded enemies

are darned stockings and patched-up trousers.

It would seem that the rain outside the window

advocated precisely this distinctly frugal

approach to the landscape--more generally to all creation.

But the Constitution doesn’t mention rain.

There’s not a single reference in the Constitution

to barometers or, for that matter, to anyone

who, perched on a stool, holding a ball of yarn,

like some muscular Alcibiades, passes the

night pouring over a fashion magazine’s dog-eared pages

in the anteroom of the Golden Age.

From “So Forth: Poems” by Joseph Brodsky