Requiem - Dedication
The mountains bow before this anguish,
The great river does not flow.
In mortal sadness the convicts languish;
The bolts stay frozen. There’s someone who
Still feels the sunset’s glow,
Someone who can still distinguish
Day from night, for whom the fresh
Wind blows. But we don’t know it, we’re
obsessive,
We only hear the tramp of boots, abrasive
Keys scraping
against our flesh.
Rising as though for early mass,
Through the capital of beasts we’d thread.
Met, more breathless than the dead,
Mistier
Hope was still singing, endlessly evasive.
The sentence! and
now at last tears flood.
She’d though the months before were
loneliness!
She’s thrown down like a rock.
The heart gives up its blood.
Yet goes ... swaying ... she can still
walk.
My friends of those two years I stood
In hell – oh – all my chance friends lost
Beyond the circle of the moon, I cry
Into the blizzards
of the permafrost.
Goodbye. Goodbye.
Anna Akhmatova