Anna Akhmatova Quotes
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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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For some the wind can fleshly blow, for some the sunlight fade at ease, but we, made partners in our dread, hear but the grating of the keys, and heavy-booted soldiers' tread. As if for early mass, we rose and each day walked the wilderness, trudging through silent street and square, to congregate, less live than dead.
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I knew: the gods turned once, in their madness, Men into things, not killing humane senses. You've been turned in to my reminiscences To make eternal the unearthly sadness.
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Let the gossip roll! What to me are Hamlet's garters, or the whirlwind of Salome's dance, or the tread of the Man in the Iron Mask? I am more iron than they.
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We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and - our former riches.
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Are the last days near, perhaps? I have forgotten your lessons, prattlers and false prophets, but you haven't forgotten me. As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future - a terrible festival of dead leaves.
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Not a single muscle quivered On his radiantly evil face. Oh, I know: his delight Is the tense and passionate knowledge That he needs nothing, That I can refuse him nothing.
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I've woven them a garment that's prepared out of poor words, those that I overheard, and will hold fast to every word and glance all of my days, even in new mischance, and if a gag should bind my tortured mouth, through which a hundred million people shout, then let them pray for me, as I do pray for them, this eve of my remembrance day.
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There is no death, each of us knows - it's banal to say. I'll leave it to others to explain.
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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.
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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... Night.
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Why is this century worse than those others? Maybe, because, in sadness and alarm, It only touched the blackest of the ulcers, But couldn't heal it in its span of time.
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At dawn they came and took you away. You were my dead: I walked behind. In the dark room children cried, the holy candle gasped for air.
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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.
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The silvery tree opens to an empty sky - maybe it is better that I am not your husband.
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As a white stone in the well's cool deepness, There lays in me one wonderful remembrance. I am not able and don't want to miss this: It is my torture and my utter gladness. I think, that he whose look will be directed Into my eyes, at once will see it whole.
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I don't know if you're alive or dead. Can you on earth be sought, Or only when the sunsets fade Be mourned serenely in my thought?
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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.
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Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all, would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me, hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.
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The sand as white as old bones, the pine trees strangely red where the sun comes down. I cannot say if it is our love, or the day, that is ending.
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All the mirrors on the wall show a man not yet appeared who could not enter this white hall. He is no better and no worse, but he is free of Lethe's curse: his warm hand makes a human pledge. Strayed from the future, can it be that he will really come to me, turning left from the bridge?
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Where are they now, my nameless friends from those two years I spent in hell? What specters mock them now, amid the fury of Siberian snows, or in the blighted circle of the moon? To them I cry, Hail and Farewell! - March 1940
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Dread. Bottomless dread... I am that shadow on the threshold defending my remnant peace.
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Now you're gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life. Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast.