Anna Akhmatova
IN 1940
At the burial of an epoch
no psalm is heard at the tomb.
Soon nettles and thistles
will decorate the spot.
The only busy hands are those
of the gravediggers. Faster! Faster!
And it's quiet, Lord, so quiet
you can hear time passing.
Some day it will surface again
like a corpse in a spring river;
but no mother's son will
claim
her,
and grandsons, sick at heart,
will turn away.
Sorrowing heads . . .
The moon swinging like a pendulum . . .
And now, over death-struck Paris,
such silence falls.
II (TO THE LONDONERS)
Time
is
now writing with impassive hand
Shakespeare's black play, his twenty-fourth.
What can we do, who know the bitter taste,
but here, by the leaden river, re-enact
those tragic lines of Hamlet, Caesar, Lear?–
or maybe guide, as escort to her tomb,
child Juliet, poor dove, with songs and torches;
or play the Peeping Tom in Macbeth's windows,
trembling no less than the hired murderer.
Only not this one, not this one, not this one–
this one we do not have the strength to read.
III (A SHADOW)
What does a certain woman know
about the hour of death?
-0. M andelstam
You swim up from the past, of all our set
the one most rosy, elegant, and tall.
