Along the Hard Crust...

Along the hard crust of deep snows,
To the secret, white house of yours,
So gentle and quiet  we both
Are walking, in silence half-lost.
And sweeter than all songs, sung ever,
Are this dream, becoming the truth,
Entwined twigs a-nodding with favor,
The light ring of your silver spurs...

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova, born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, was a significant Russian poet whose work ranged from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, including her seminal long poem, Requiem. Her work often grappled with themes of love, suffering, and the trauma of living through the oppressive Soviet regime. Despite being censored and witnessing the persecution of her loved ones, she remained in Russia and became a symbolic figure of resistance and artistic integrity.

Anna Akhmatova

Departure

Anna Akhmatova, Simple Poetry

You Will Hear Thunder

Anna Akhmatova, Simple Poetry

Under Her Dark Veil

Anna Akhmatova, Simple Poetry

Thunder

Anna Akhmatova, Simple Poetry

English

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March Elegy

I have enough treasures from the past
to last me longer than I need, or want.
You know as well as I . . . malevolent memory
won't let go of half of them:
a modest church, with its gold cupola
slightly askew; a harsh chorus
of crows; the whistle of a train;
a birch tree haggard in a field
as if it had just been sprung from jail;
a secret midnight conclave
of monumental Bible-oaks;
and a tiny rowboat that comes drifting out
of somebody's dreams, slowly foundering.
Winter has already loitered here,
lightly powdering these fields,
casting an impenetrable haze
that fills the world as far as the horizon.
I used to think that after we are gone
there's nothing, simply nothing at all.
Then who's that wandering by the porch
again and calling us by na...

Anna Akhmatova

And As It's Going...

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,
The silver beauty of her gentle branches.
The bird began to sing the song of light and pleasure
To us, who fears to lift looks from the earth,
Who are so lofty, bitter and intense,
About days when we were saved together.

Anna Akhmatova

Celebrate

Celebrate our anniversary  cant you see
tonight the snowy night of our first winter
comes back again in every road and tree -
that winter night of diamantine splendour.

Steam is pouring out of yellow stables,
the Moika rivers sinking under snow,
the moonlights misted as it is in fables,
and where we are heading  I dont know.

There are icebergs on the Marsovo Pole.
The Lebyazhyas crazed with crystal art.....
Whose soul can compare with my soul,
if joy and fear are in my heart? -

And if your voice, a marvellous birds,
quivers at my shoulder, in the night,
and the snow shines with a silver light,
warmed by a sudden ray, by your words?

Anna Akhmatova

White Night

I haven't locked the door,
Nor lit the candles,
You don't know, don't care,
That tired I haven't the strength
To decide to go to bed.
Seeing the fields fade in
The sunset murk of pine-needles,
And to know all is lost,

That life is a cursed hell:
I've got drunk
On your voice in the doorway.
I was sure you'd come back.

Anna Akhmatova

For Osip Mandelstam

And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
And over St Peters there are poplars, crows
theres a pale green dome there that glows,
dim in the sun-shrouded dust.
The field of heroes lingers in my thought,
Kulikovos barbarian battleground.
The frozen poplars, like glasses for a toast,
clash now, more noisily, overhead.
As though it was our wedding, and the crowd
were drinking to our health and happiness.
But Fear and the Muse take turns to guard
the room where the exiled poet is banished,
and the night, marching at full pace,
of the coming dawn, has no knowledge.

Anna Akhmatova

Willow

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,
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 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.

Anna Akhmatova