Anna Akhmatova

Wild honey smells of freedom The dust - of sunlight The mouth of a young girl, like a violet But gold - smells of nothing.

And you know, I agree to everything: I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy, Darkness will be light and sin lovely.

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.

I myself, from the very beginning, Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium Or a reflection in someone else's mirror, Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. Already I knew the list of crimes That I was destined to commit.

If you were music I would listen to you ceaselessly And my low spirits would brighten up.

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.

I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

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.

Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.

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."

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.

I seem to myself, as in a dream, Am accidental guest in this dreadful body.

Though you are three times more beautiful than angels, Though you are the sister of the river willows, I will kill you with my singing, Without spilling your blood on the ground. Not touching you with my hand, Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you, But with your unimaginable groans I will finally slake my thirst. From her, who wandered the earth before me, Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame, From her, who still exists in the ether— From her you will set me free.