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Requiem (excerpt)
by Anna Akhmatova
In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes, I can.” And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.
1 April, 1957, Leningrad
Epilogue
II
Again the hands of the clock are nearing
The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch
All of you: the cripple they had to support
Painfully to the end of the line; the moribund;
And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and
Say: “I come here as if it were home.”
I should like to call you all by name,
But they have lost the lists….
I have woven for them a great shroud
Out of the poor words I overheard them speak.
I remember them always and everywhere,
And if they shut my tormented mouth,
Through which a hundred million of my people cry,
Let them remember me also….
And if in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honour,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,
Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me
Lest in blessed death I should forget
The grinding scream of the Black Marias,
The hideous clanging gate, the old
Woman wailing like a wounded beast.
And may the melting snow drop like tears
From my motionless bronze eyelids,
And the prison pigeons coo above me
And the ships sail slowly down the Neva
—
about the poet
A note from the site where I obtained this poem: This is an unbearably moving poem. It comes at the end of Akhmatova’s great Requiem sequence, which she wrote during the oppression of the Stalin years. During those years she was harassed a great deal, and her son was taken away by the police. It was for him that she stood in the lines outside the prison gates. But any comments are irrelevant with such a poem.