Requiem - Prologue
In those years only the dead smiled,
Glad to be at rest:
And
A needless appendix
to its prisons.
It was then that the railway-yards
Were asylums of the mad;
Short were the locomotives’
Farewell songs.
Stars of death stood
Above us, and innocent
Writhed under bloodstained boots, and
Under the tyres of
Black Marias.
Anna Akhmatova