Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Soviet Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965.
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Famous Anna Akhmatova Poems
In Dream
Black and enduring separation
I share equally with you.
Why weep? Give me your hand,
Promise me you will come again.
You and I are like high
Mountains and we can’t move closer.
Just send me word
At midnight sometime through the stars.
I Saw My Friend At The Front Door
I saw my friend to the front door
I stood in the golden dust.
Momentous sounds issued
From the little belfry close by.
Tossed! Such a made-up word-
What am I, a flower or a letter?
But my eyes already gaze grimly
Into the darkened looking glass.
My Way
One goes in straightforward ways,
One in a circle roams:
Waits for a girl of his gone days,
Or for returning home.
But I do go — and woe is there —
By a way nor straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains — off the railroad.
To The Many
I — am your voice, the warmth of your breath,
I — am the reflection of your face,
The futile trembling of futile wings,
I am with you to he end, in any case.
That’s why you so fervently love
Me in my weakness and in my sin;
That’s why you impulsively gave
Me the best of your sons;
That’s why you never even asked
Me for any word of him
And blackened my forever-deserted home
With fumes of praise.
And they say — it’s impossible to fuse more closely,
Impossible to love more abandonedly. . .
As the shadow from the body wants to part,
As the flesh from the soul wants to separate,
So I want now — to be forgotten..
Rachel
When Jacob and Rachel met for the first time,
He bowed to her like a humble wayfarer.
The herds were raising hot dust to the skies,
The little well’s mouth was covered by a boulder.
He rolled the old boulder away from the well
And watered the flock with clean water himself.
Yet sweet little sadness crept into his heart
With each passing day growing stronger.
To wed her he bargained to toil seven years
As shepherd for her artful father.
Oh, Rachel! To the captive of love in his eyes
The seven years seemed as a few dazzling days.
Yet Laban was thirsty for silver, and wise,
And mercy he didn’t espouse,
Assuming forgiveness for all kind of lies…
As long as they serve his own house.
He took homely Leah with his sure hand
And led her to Jacob in his wedding tent.
A sultry night reigns over high desert sky
And spreads misty dews in the morning,
While pulling her braids in despair all that night
The younger of sisters is moaning,
Sends curses to Leah and God for her doom
Imploring the angel of death to come soon.
As Jacob is dreaming the sweetest of dreams:
The clear well spring in the valley
And Rachel’s eyes happily looking at him
Her beautiful voice singing softly:
O, weren’t you kissing me, Jacob, with love
And calling me always your black turtledove?
To Boris Pasternak
It ceased – the voice, inimitable here,
The peer of groves left forever us,
He changed himself into eternal ear…
Into the rain, of that sang more than once.
And all the flowers, that grow under heavens,
Began to flourish – to meet the going death…
But suddenly it got the silent one and saddened –
The planet, bearing the humble name, the Earth.
Music
Something of heavens ever burns in it,
I like to watch its wondrous facets’ growth.
It speaks with me in fate’s non-seldom fits,
When others fear to approach close.
When the last of friends had looked away
From me in grave, it lay to me in silence,
And sang as sing a thunderstorm in May,
As if all flowers began to talk in gardens.
Let Somebody Else Rest By Southern Sea
Let somebody else rest by southern sea,
Enjoying the paradise land,
It’s northerly here, and fall of this year,
I chose to be my girl-friend.
I’ve carried here the memory sure
Of my last rejecting a date –
The flame, so cold, so easy and pure,
Of my overcoming the fate.
There Are The Words That Couldn’t Be Twice Said
There are the words that couldn’t be twice said,
He, who said once, spent out all his senses.
Only two things have never their end –
The heavens’ blue and the Creator’s mercy.
To The Muse
The Muse my sister looked in my face,
her gaze was bright and clear,
and she took away my golden ring,
the gift of the virginal year.
Muse! everyone else is happy –
girls, wives, widows – all around!
I swear I’d rather die on the rack
than live fettered and bound.
In time I’ll join the guessing-game,
pluck petals from the daisy’s wheel.
Each creature on this earth, I know,
must suffer love’s ordeal.
Tonight I pine for no one,
alone in my candlelit room;
but I don’t-don’t-don’t want to know
who’s kissing whom.
At dawn the mirrors, mocking, will say:
“Your gaze is not bright or clear.”
I’ll sigh: “The Muse my sister came
and took the gift of gifts away.”
1912
from Vercher (Evening), Poets Guild
(Translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward)
One Goes In Straightforward Ways
One goes in straightforward ways,
One in a circle roams:
Waits for a girl of his gone days,
Or for returning home.
But I do go — and woe is there —
By a way nor straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains — off the railroad.
To Fall Ill As One Should, Deliriously
To fall ill as one should, deliriously
Hot, meet everyone again,
To stroll broad avenues in the seashore garden
Full of the wind and the sun.
Even the dead, today, have agreed to come,
And the exiles, into my house.
Lead the child to me by the hand.
Long I have missed him.
I shall eat blue grapes with those who are dead,
Drink the iced
Wine, and watch the gray waterfall pour
On to the damp flint bed.
Behind the lake the moon’s not stirred
And seems to be a window through
Into a silent, well-lit house,
Where something unpleasant has occured.
Has the master been brought home dead,
The mistress run off with a lover,
Or has a little girl gone missing,
And her shoes found by the creek-bed…
We can’t see. But feel some awful thing,
And we don’t want to talk.
Doleful, the cry of eagle-owls, and hot
In the garden the wind is blustering.
When I Write Poems
When I’m embraced by airy inspiration,
I am a bridge between the sky and earth.
Of all what heart high-values in creation
I am a king, when breathing with a verse!
Just if my soul wishes it, my fairy,
I shall give you the peaceful coast band,
Where, with a hum, the pinky sea is carrying
The dreaming tide to reach the dreaming land.
I can do all, just trust in me: I’m mighty;
I have the roots for kindness and for love;
And if I want, from clouds and from the lightning
I’ll make a cover your sweet bed above.
And I can, dear, create a word such special,
That it would change laws of the whole world,
To call again its own celebration
And stop the sun from fall in the night cold.
I’m all another in my inspiration,
I am a bridge between the sky and earth.
Of all what heart high-values in creation
I am a king, when breathing with a verse!
We Don’t Know How To Say Goodbye
We don’t know how to say good-bye
We wander on, shoulder by shoulder.
Already the sun is going down.
You’re moody, I am your shadow.
Let’s step inside a church and watch
baptisms, marriages, masses for the dead.
Why are we different from the rest?
Outdoors again, each of us turns his head.
Or else, let’s sit in the graveyard
On the trampled snow, sighing to each other.
That stick in your hand is tracing mansions
In which we shall always be together.
I am a Bard…
I am a bard – I am a heaven bird,
I need no any richness of the world.
I love a flower and so charming lass
In aromatic springs that never pass.
I love a whisper, very gentle and long,
And, in full silence, a despondent song.
To The Londoners
(From the ‘In the Fortieth Year’)
1940
The twenty-fourth drama of Shakespeare
Time’s writing with its indifferent hand.
We, selves, the guests of the awful Feast here,
Better would read Hamlet, Caesar, and Lear
Over the river, in heavy lead clad;
Better – to bear, with singing and torches,
Juliet, the dove, to her family’s graves,
Peep into windows of Macbeth’s castle godless,
Tremble with scum – hired killers and knaves –
But not this one, Lord… oh, not this…oh, not this, –
To read this one we already haven’t strengths!
