Anna Akhmatova
We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked.Collection: Summer
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me . . . and asked me in a whisper . . . "Can you describe this?" And I said: "I can."Collection: Years
We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.Collection: Generosity
But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you ... more proud.Collection: Blow
No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot survivor of that time, that place.Collection: Time
Song falls silent, music is dumb, But the air burns with their fragrance, And white winter, on its knees, Observes everything with reverent attention.Collection: Song
Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.Collection: Song
... he is rewarded with a form of eternal childhood, with the bounty and vigilance of the stars, the whole world was his inheritance and he shared it with everyone.Collection: Stars
This land, although not my native land, Will be remembered forever. And the sea's lightly iced, Unsalty water. The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk, The air is heady, like wine, And the rosy body of the pines Is naked in the sunset hour. And the sunset itself on such waves of ether That I just can't comprehend Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world, Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.Collection: Wine
This Cruel Age has deflected me.Collection: Age
And it seemed to me that there were fires Flying till dawn without number And I never found out things-those Strange eyes of his-what colour? Everything trembling and singing and Were you my enemy or my friend, Winter was it or summer?Collection: Summer
Let whoever wants to, relax in the south, And bask in the garden of paradise. Here is the essence of northand it's autumn I've chosen as this year's friend.Collection: Autumn
Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don't break my heart, don't ring out.Collection: Song
A loss, but who still mourns the breath of one woman, or laments one wife? Though my heart never can forget, how, for one look, she gave up her life.Collection: Heart
The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.Collection: Stones
Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.Collection: Girl
I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.Collection: Recalls
And this tenderness was not like That which a certain poet At the beginning of the century called true And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at all It rang out, like the first waterfall, It crunched like the crust of bluish ice And it prayed with a swanlike voice, And it broke down right before our eyes.Collection: Eye
A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me.Collection: Mother
We are all carousers and loose women here; How unhappy we are together!Collection: Unhappy
No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.Collection: Sky