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My shadow serves as the friend I crave

Anna Akhmatova

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Anna Akhmatova
Age: 76 †
Born: 1889
Born: June 23
Died: 1966
Died: March 5
Author
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Poet
Translator
Writer
Odesa
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko
Anna Achmatova
Anna Ahmatova
Anna Gorenko
Anna Andreevna Gorenko
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova
Crave
Serves
Shadow
Friend

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Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.
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It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.
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We learned not to meet anymore, We don't raise our eyes to one another, But we ourselves won't guarantee What could happen to us in an hour.
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Let whoever wants to, relax in the south, And bask in the garden of paradise. Here is the essence of north—and it's autumn I've chosen as this year's friend.
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A land not mine, still forever memorable, the waters of its ocean chill and fresh. Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk, and the air drunk, like wine, late sun lays bare the rosy limbs of the pinetrees. Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.
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As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.
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I go forth to seek To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak.
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The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias.
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If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.
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I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity and at the bottom of it all: only love poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love
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Natural thunder heralds the wetness of fresh water high clouds to quench the thirst of fields gone dry and parched, a messenger of blessed rain, but this was as dry as hell must be. My distraught perception refused to believe it, because of the insane suddenness with which it sounded, swelled and hit, and how casually it came to murder my child.
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I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies. Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them to praise.
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Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.
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Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground whisk the lamps away.
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Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.
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Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, Who suffered death because she chose to turn.
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I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.
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Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free.
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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.
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I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.
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