! In Memoriam: Anna Akhmatova, Poet Poem by Michael Shepherd

Last Spring I stood
in front of the bronze statue
they’ve put up in your honour
on the banks of the Neva
not far from the prison's red wall
just as, half in jest, you requested it,
never expecting this...

the thaw had just started
and a white snow crystal, already half transparent,
melted in the corner of your bronze eye
as if it were a tear

I watched it slide down Spring's warming bronze,
down past your name on the base,
across the trodden snow of the pavement,
into the Neva whose memory is time itself,
and as it joined the river's flow of breaking, creaking ice and snow
the sunlight caught it, briefly.

The next day
I walked to your dacha in the woods
as the first light rain of Spring
gently washed the birch saplings
and the brown leaves of last autumn now revealed
made a silent carpet for my feet;
and the pale sunlight
caught a raindrop, briefly.

In some future Spring
a poet’s tears fall as gentle rain.