Poems by Anna Akhmatova

Along the hard crust of deep snows,

An as it's going often at love's breaking,

And Pushkin's exile had begun right here,

As a white stone in the well's cool deepness,

Celebrate our anniversary – can’t you see

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

Although this land is not my own,

Everythings looted, betrayed and traded,

And the town is frozen solid in a vice,

How can you bear to look at the Neva?

I don't know if you're alive or dead.

I hear the oriole's always-grieving voice,

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,

I wrung my hands under my dark veil. . .

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,

Lying in me, as though it were a white

I have enough treasures from the past

Memory of sun seeps from the heart.

Not under foreign skies

‘What does a certain woman know of the hour of her death?’ - Mandelstam

So many stones have been thrown at me,

I pray to the sunbeam from the window -

And the stone word fell

There will be thunder then. Remember me.

Twenty-first. Night. Monday.

Under her dark veil she wrung her hands.

I haven't locked the door,

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?

And I grew up in patterned tranquility,

You thought I was that type:

You will hear thunder and remember me,