And she who is parting with her sweetheart today –

Let her forge her pain into strength.

By the children we swear, we swear by the graves,

That no one will force us to submit.

Anna Akhmatova

       2. (from VII Secrets of the Craft)

I have no use for battlefield odes,
And the charms of an intricate elegy.
For me a poem must be impromptu—
Not a matter of tradition.

If you only knew what kind of trash
Poems shamelessly grow in:
Like weeds under the fence,
Like crabgrass, dandelions.

An angry shout, the smell of fresh tar,
Mysterious mildew on the wall—
And a poem begins sounding fervent, tender,
Making us all joyful.

Part of pallet fence at Oak Tree House

The Last Toast

I drink to the ruined house,

To the evil of my life,

To our shared loneliness

And I drink to you –

To the lie of lips that betrayed me,

To the deadly coldness of the eyes,

To the fact that the world is cruel and depraved.

To the fact that God did not save.

Anna Akhmatova 27 June 1934

WILLOW (Anna Akhmatova 1940)

And I grew up in patterned tranquillity,

In the cool nursery of the young century.

And the voice of man was not dear to me,

But the voice of the wind I could understand.

But best of all the silver willow.

And, obligingly, it lived

With me all my life; it’s weeping branches

Fanned my insomnia with dreams.

And – strange! – I have outlived it.

There the stump stands; with strange voices

Other willows are conversing

Under our, under those skies.

And I am silent…As if a brother had died.