And the stone word fell

by Anna Akhmatova

And the stone word fell
On my still-living breast.
Never mind, I was ready.
I will manage somehow.

Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—

Unless . . . Summer’s ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.
For a long time I’ve foreseen this
Brilliant day, deserted house.

by Anna Akhmatova

The two of us won’t share a glass together
Be it of water or of sweet red wine;
We won’t be kissing, in the morning either
Nor, late at night, enjoy an evening shine…
You breathe the sun, I breathe the moon; however
We are united by one love forever.

I always have with me my true soul mate,
You have with you your ever-merry girlfriend;
Yet I’m acquainted with your eye’s dismay
As you’re the reason of my lifelong ailment.
The length of our dates won’t be increased,
That’s how, it’s doomed, to honor our peace.

Yet, it’s my breath that flows in your rhymes
While in my rhymes your voice is singing clear;
Oh’ neither oblivion, nor fear
Will ever dare to touch this kind of flame.
I wish you knew how I am longing now
To feel your dry and rosy lips somehow.

by Anna Akhmatova

2

Over a pier, the first beacon inflamed —
The vanguard of other sea-rangers;
The mariner cried and bared his head;
He sailed with death beside and ahead
In seas, packed with furious dangers.

3

By our doors Great Victory stays …
But how we’ll glory her advent?
Let women lift higher the children! They blessed
With life mid a thousand thousands deaths —
Thus will be the dearest answered.

by Anna Akhmatova

There are the words that couldn’t be twice said,
He, who said once, spent out all his senses.
Only two things have never their end –
The heavens’ blue and the Creator’s mercy.

by Anna Akhmatova

They didn’t meet me, roamed,
On steps with lanterns bright.
I entered quiet home
In murky, pail moonlight.

Under a lamp’s green halo,
With smile of kept in rage,
My friend said, ‘Cinderella,
Your voice is very strange…’

A cricket plays its fiddle;
A fire-place grew black.
Oh, someone took my little
White shoe as a keep-sake,

And gave me three carnations,
While casting dawn eyes -.
My sins for accusations,
You couldn’t be disguised.

And heart hates to believe in
The time, that’s close too,
When he will ask for women
To try on my white shoe.

by Anna Akhmatova

This evening’s light is golden bright,
The April’s coolness is so tender,
Though you are many years too late,
I still do welcome you to enter.

Right next to me why don’t you sit
And look with happy eyes around.
This little notebook has in it
The poems written in my childhood.

Forgive me that I’ve lived and mourned,
And was not grateful for the sun rays…
Forgive me please, forgive me for
I have mistaken you for others…

by Anna Akhmatova

Thoughts of the sunlight fainter and dimmer,
And parched the grass.
Breezes, freh breezes at dawn’s early shimmer,
Flit by repass.

Look at the willows against a clear heaven,
Cloudless and wide.
Better, Far better not to be given
Thee for thy bride!

Thoughts of the daylight dimmer and fainter.
Oh, darkness! Gloom!
Once again . . . Morning,
Tell me if winter is come.

by Anna Akhmatova

There will be thunder then. Remember me.
Say ‘ She asked for storms.’ The entire
world will turn the colour of crimson stone,
and your heart, as then, will turn to fire.

That day, in Moscow, a true prophecy,
when for the last time I say goodbye,
soaring to the heavens that I longed to see,
leaving my shadow here in the sky.

by Anna Akhmatova

It ceased – the voice, inimitable here,
The peer of groves left forever us,
He changed himself into eternal ear…
Into the rain, of that sang more than once.

And all the flowers, that grow under heavens,
Began to flourish – to meet the going death…
But suddenly it got the silent one and saddened –
The planet, bearing the humble name, the Earth.

by Anna Akhmatova

To fall ill as one should, deliriously
Hot, meet everyone again,
To stroll broad avenues in the seashore garden
Full of the wind and the sun.

Even the dead, today, have agreed to come,
And the exiles, into my house.
Lead the child to me by the hand.
Long I have missed him.

I shall eat blue grapes with those who are dead,
Drink the iced
Wine, and watch the gray waterfall pour
On to the damp flint bed.

——

Behind the lake the moon’s not stirred
And seems to be a window through
Into a silent, well-lit house,
Where something unpleasant has occured.

Has the master been brought home dead,
The mistress run off with a lover,
Or has a little girl gone missing,
And her shoes found by the creek-bed…

We can’t see. But feel some awful thing,
And we don’t want to talk.
Doleful, the cry of eagle-owls, and hot
In the garden the wind is blustering.

by Anna Akhmatova

I — am your voice, the warmth of your breath,
I — am the reflection of your face,
The futile trembling of futile wings,
I am with you to he end, in any case.

That’s why you so fervently love
Me in my weakness and in my sin;
That’s why you impulsively gave
Me the best of your sons;
That’s why you never even asked
Me for any word of him
And blackened my forever-deserted home
With fumes of praise.
And they say — it’s impossible to fuse more closely,
Impossible to love more abandonedly. . .

As the shadow from the body wants to part,
As the flesh from the soul wants to separate,
So I want now — to be forgotten..

by Anna Akhmatova

The Muse my sister looked in my face,
her gaze was bright and clear,
and she took away my golden ring,
the gift of the virginal year.

Muse! everyone else is happy –
girls, wives, widows – all around!
I swear I’d rather die on the rack
than live fettered and bound.

In time I’ll join the guessing-game,
pluck petals from the daisy’s wheel.
Each creature on this earth, I know,
must suffer love’s ordeal.

Tonight I pine for no one,
alone in my candlelit room;
but I don’t-don’t-don’t want to know
who’s kissing whom.

At dawn the mirrors, mocking, will say:
“Your gaze is not bright or clear.”
I’ll sigh: “The Muse my sister came
and took the gift of gifts away.”

1912
from Vercher (Evening), Poets Guild
(Translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward)

by Anna Akhmatova

True tenderness is silent
and can’t be mistaken for anything else.
In vain with earnest desire
you cover my shoulders with fur;
In vain you try to persuade me
of the merits of first love.
But I know too well the meaning
of your persistent burning glances.

by Anna Akhmatova

Twenty-first. Night. Monday.
Silhouette of the capitol in darkness.
Some good-for-nothing — who knows why—
made up the tale that love exists on earth.

People believe it, maybe from laziness
or boredom, and live accordingly:
they wait eagerly for meetings, fear parting,
and when they sing, they sing about love.

But the secret reveals itself to some,
and on them silence settles down…
I found this out by accident
and now it seems I’m sick all the time.

by Anna Akhmatova

Under her dark veil she wrung her hands.
«Why are you so pale today?»
«Because I made him drink of stinging grief
Until he got drunk on it.
How can I forget? He staggered out,
His mouth twisted in agony.
I ran down not touching the bannister

And caught up with him at the gate.
I cried: ‘A joke!
That’s all it was. If you leave, I’ll die.’
He smiled calmly and grimly
And told me: ‘Don’t stand here in the wind.’ «

by Anna Akhmatova

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.

by Anna Akhmatova

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed by our hands?

In the west the falling light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

by Anna Akhmatova

And I grew up in patterned tranquillity,
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.

by Anna Akhmatova

You thought I was that type:
That you could forget me,
And that I’d plead and weep
And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare,

Or that I’d ask the sorcerers
For some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift:
My precious perfumed handkerchief.

Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul
Vicarious tears or a single glance.

And I swear to you by the garden of the angels,
I swear by the miracle-working icon,
And by the fire and smoke of our nights:
I will never come back to you.

by Anna Akhmatova

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.

That day in Moscow, it will all come true,
when, for the last time, I take my leave,
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,
Leaving my shadow still to be with you.