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If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.

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
Give
Find
Giving
Love
Bitter
Glory
Peace

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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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This cruel age has deflected me, like a river from this course. Strayed from its familiar shores, my changeling life has flowed into a sister channel. How many spectacles I've missed: the curtain rising without me, and falling too. How many friends I never had the chance to meet.
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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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Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.
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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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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.
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The secret of secrets is inside me again.
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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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You do not know just what you've been forgiven.
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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.
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It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.
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How the miracle of our meeting Shone there and sang, I didn't want to return From there to anywhere. Happiness instead of duty Was bitter delight to me. Not obliged to speak to anyone, I spoke for a long while. Let passions stifle lovers, Demanding answers, We, my dear, are only souls At the limits of the world.
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All that I am hangs by a thread tonight
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I seem to myself, as in a dream, Am accidental guest in this dreadful body.
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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?
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Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and sobbed, His dear disciple, stone-faced, stared. His mother stood apart. No other looked into her secret eyes. Nobody dared.
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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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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.
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All has been looted, betrayed, sold black death's wing flashed ahead.
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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.
Anna Akhmatova