Anna Akhmatova Poems

Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded,
black death’s wing’s overhead.
Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?
...

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
...

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
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Celebrate our anniversary - can't you see
tonight the snowy night of our first winter
comes back again in every road and tree -
that winter night of diamantine splendour.
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For Osip Mandelstam

And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
...

You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
...

I don't know if you're alive or dead.
Can you on earth be sought,
Or only when the sunsets fade
Be mourned serenely in my thought?
...

Do not cry for me, Mother, seeing me in the grave.

I
This greatest hour was hallowed and thandered
...

And you, my friends who have been called away,
I have been spared to mourn for you and weep,
Not as a frozen willow over your memory,
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I wrung my hands under my dark veil. . .
"Why are you pale, what makes you reckless?"
-- Because I have made my loved one drunk
with an astringent sadness.
...