Anna Akhmatova

Along the hard crust of deep snows, To the secret, white house of yours, So gentle and quiet ' we both

An as it's going often at love's breaking, The ghost of first days came again to us, The silver willow through window then stretched in,

And Pushkin's exile had begun right here, And Lermontov's expulsion had been "canceled." There is the easy grasses' scent on highland.

As a white stone in the well's cool deepness, There lays in me one wonderful remembrance. I am not able and don't want to miss this:

Celebrate our anniversary ' can't you see tonight the snowy night of our first winter comes back again in every road and tree -

Do not cry for me, Mother, seeing me in the grave. I This greatest hour was hallowed and thandered

Although this land is not my own, I will remember its inland sea and the waters that are so cold

Everythings looted, betrayed and traded, black deaths wings overhead. Everythings eaten by hunger, unsated,

And the town is frozen solid in a vice, Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass. Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,

How can you bear to look at the Neva? How can you bear to cross the bridges?. Not in vain am I known as the grieving one

I don't know if you're alive or dead. Can you on earth be sought, Or only when the sunsets fade

I hear the oriole's always-grieving voice, And the rich summer's welcome loss I hear In the sickle's serpentine hiss

I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening

I wrung my hands under my dark veil. . . "Why are you pale, what makes you reckless?" -- Because I have made my loved one drunk

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense. You lived aloof, maintaining to the end

And the just man trailed God's shining agent, over a black mountain, in his giant track, while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:

Lying in me, as though it were a white Stone in the depths of a well, is one Memory that I cannot, will not, fight:

I have enough treasures from the past to last me longer than I need, or want. You know as well as I . . . malevolent memory

Memory of sun seeps from the heart. Grass grows yellower. Faintly if at all the early snowflakes

Not under foreign skies Nor under foreign wings protected - I shared all this with my own people

'What does a certain woman know of the hour of her death?' - Mandelstam Tallest, suavest of us, why Memory, forcing you to appear from the past, pass

So many stones have been thrown at me, That I'm not frightened of them anymore, And the pit has become a solid tower,

I pray to the sunbeam from the window - It is pale, thin, straight. Since morning I have been silent,

And the stone word fell On my still-living breast. Never mind, I was ready.

There will be thunder then. Remember me. Say ' She asked for storms.' The entire world will turn the colour of crimson stone,

Twenty-first. Night. Monday. Silhouette of the capitol in darkness. Some good-for-nothing -- who knows why--

Under her dark veil she wrung her hands. "Why are you so pale today?" "Because I made him drink of stinging grief

I haven't locked the door, Nor lit the candles, You don't know, don't care,

Why is this age worse than earlier ages? In a stupor of grief and dread have we not fingered the foulest wounds

And I grew up in patterned tranquility, In the cool nursery of the young century. And the voice of man was not dear to me,

You thought I was that type: That you could forget me, And that I'd plead and weep

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,