by Anna Akhmatova
To feel thoroughly ill, to sweat in delirium,
To meet everyone known again,
To roam the broad paths of a sea-side garden,
Filled with the wind and sun.
Today, even the dead, the exiled,
Choose to enter
To feel thoroughly ill, to sweat in delirium,
To meet everyone known again,
To roam the broad paths of a sea-side garden,
Filled with the wind and sun.
Today, even the dead, the exiled,
Choose to enter
To lose the freshness of speech, the simplicity of feeling,
Isn’t that, for us, like a painter losing the power of sight,
Or an actor, their voice and movement,
Or a lovely woman, her beauty?
But don’t
Gold dovecote by waters,
Tender and dazzlingly green;
A salt-breeze sweeps away
The gondola’s narrow wake.
Such sensitive, strange eyes in the streets,
The bright toys in the shops:
A lion with a book, on a lace
We shall not sip from the same glass,
No water for us, or sweet wine;
We’ll not embrace at morning,
Not gaze from the same sill at night;
You breathe the sun, I the moon,
Yet the
Oh, I’ve not locked the door,
I’ve not lit the candles,
You know I’m too tired
To think of sleep.
See, how the fields die down,
In the sunset gloom of firs,
And I’m drunk on the
‘Why do you wander, restless?’
Why do you wander, restless?
Why stare, unable to breathe?
Surely you understand, our two
Souls have been welded as one.
You, you’ll be solaced by me
In a way no one
Why pretend to be
Now breeze, now stone, now a bird?
Why smile at me,
In sudden lightning from summer’s sky?
Don’t torture me further, and don’t touch me!
Leave me to my prophetic dreams…
A drunken
Yes, I loved those nocturnal gatherings –
The iced glasses on the little table,
A fine steam from the black, fragrant coffee,
The red fire roaring, the winter heat,
The laughter at caustic literary jokes,
And a
You should appear less often in my dreams,
Since we meet so frequently;
Yet only in night’s sanctuary
Are you sad, troubled, and tender.
And sweeter than seraphic praise
Is your lips’ dear flattery…
Ah, in dreams
My voice is weak but not my will,
It’s better even without love.
High skies and mountain winds,
And my thoughts now innocent.
Insomnia, my nurse, is elsewhere.
I’m not brooding by cold ashes.
And the curved