To Osip Mandelstam Poem by Sofiul Azam

Quietly, quietly read it back to me.
- Osip Mandelstam

1.

I read beyond the ribs of what you wrote
in Voronzeh's biting cold. I wonder
how a silent tilling like yours yielded warmth,
how like a kid crazy for stamps you held on

to it stored in the granary of your notebook -
a strip of sunlight for the icy dampness,
incensed by a drop of musk, and how the salt
in your tears tastes sweeter than sugar.

I don't have at hand the maps to track
down the symbols you kept at work
like corpuscles in the veins of your elegies -
cryptic scrolls of Copernicus in the hideout.

I wonder what I have as a good match for
the exactness of your exact cries in exile.

2.

Like a mud-skipper conceived in silence,
you knew the tactics of tides - the stages
where you learnt every scary noise
implies a fight. As you towered, yet locked

to the mercy of a place, silence felt a lot
scarier than a devil's breath on your neck
and left you like a field of ripe rice
beaten up by its freezing hail. At times,

noises alerted you like sirens before a blitz,
but silence on the sly deafened your ears;
and you no longer could hear the winds'
dumb mutterings foretelling a change.

You had the puppet's strings held by silence,
its fingers chillier than a constrictor's coils.


from SAFE UNDER WATER (2014)