"I've woven them a garment that's prepared out of poor words, those that I overheard, and will hold fast to every word and glance all of my days, even in new mischance, and if a gag should bind my tortured mouth, through which a hundred million people shout, then let them pray for me, as I do pray for them, this eve of my remembrance day."

"From the works of Primo Levi to the recipes of imagined foods found in the concentration camps of Terezin to the brave poetry of Anna Akhmatova written during the Stalinist era, we are forced to acknowledge the power of poetry to name the unspeakable-to enter and to illuminate the secret corridor of horrors."

"The importance of Akhmatova's works in the Russian poetic tradition can scarcely be exaggerated. These works also hold a place of honor in the history of artistic engagement of moral responsibility."

"Anna Andreevna Akhmatova used poetry to give voice to the struggles and deepest yearnings of the Russian people, for whom she remains the greatest of literary heroines. She has lately come to symbolize for the world even beyond Russia the power of art to survive and transcend the terrors of our century."

"At dawn they came and took you away. You were my dead: I walked behind. In the dark room children cried, the holy candle gasped for air."

"Where are they now, my nameless friends from those two years I spent in hell? What specters mock them now, amid the fury of Siberian snows, or in the blighted circle of the moon? To them I cry, Hail and Farewell! — March 1940"

"This woman is sick to her marrow-bone, this woman is utterly alone, with husband dead, with son away in jail. Pray for me. Pray."

"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. — 1961"

"There is no death, each of us knows — it's banal to say. I'll leave it to others to explain."

"Such grief might make the mountain stoop, reverse the waters where they flow, but cannot burst these ponderous bolts that block us from the prison cells crowded with mortal woe..."

"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... Night."

"From childhood I have been afraid of mummers. It always seemed an extra shadow without face or name had slipped among them..."

"That woman I once was, in a black agate necklace, I do not wish to meet again till the Day of Judgement."

"You... you are as old as the Mamre oak, ancient interrogator of the moon, whose feigned groans cannot take us in. You write laws of iron."

"I have lit my treasured candles, one by one, to hallow this night. With you, who do not come, I wait the birth of the year. Dear God! the flame has drowned in crystal, and the wine, like poison, burns Old malice bites the air, old ravings rave again, though the hour has not yet struck."

"This cruel age has deflected me, like a river from this course. Strayed from its familiar shores, my changeling life has flowed into a sister channel. How many spectacles I've missed: the curtain rising without me, and falling too. How many friends I never had the chance to meet."

"Dread. Bottomless dread... I am that shadow on the threshold defending my remnant peace."

"Creature of special tastes, you do not wait for gout and fame to elevate you to a luxurious jubilee chair, but bear your triumph over the flowering heather, over wildernesses. And you are guilty of nothing: neither of this, that, nor anything.."

"For seventeen months I have cried aloud calling you back to your lair. I hurled myself at the hangman's foot. You are my son, changed into nightmare. Confusion occupies the world, and I am powerless to tell somebody brute from something human, or on what day the word spells, "Kill!""

"As a white stone in the well's cool deepness, There lays in me one wonderful remembrance. I am not able and don't want to miss this: It is my torture and my utter gladness. I think, that he whose look will be directed Into my eyes, at once will see it whole."

"The silvery tree opens to an empty sky — maybe it is better that I am not your husband."

"All as before: against the dining-room windows Beats the scattered windswept snow, And I have not changed either, But a man came to me. I asked: "What do you want?" He replied: "To be with you in Hell." I laughed: "Oh, you'll foredoom Us both to disaster.""

"I knew: the gods turned once, in their madness, Men into things, not killing humane senses. You've been turned in to my reminiscences To make eternal the unearthly sadness."

"And the just man trailed God's shining agent, over a black mountain, in his giant track, while a restless voice kept harrying his woman: "It's not too late, you can still look back at the red towers of your native Sodom, the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed, at the empty windows set in the tall house where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.""

"Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all, would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me, hiding the tremor of his mortal pain."

"Thinking of the sun makes my heart beat faster — too fast! What darkness! From this night winter begins."

"But lifting his dry hand He lightly touched the flowers: "Tell me how men kiss you, Tell me how you kiss men.""

"Not a single muscle quivered On his radiantly evil face. Oh, I know: his delight Is the tense and passionate knowledge That he needs nothing, That I can refuse him nothing."

"We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked."

"We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and — our former riches."

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

"The grave I go to will not be my own. But if I could step outside myself and contemplate the person that I am, I should know at last what envy is."

"Let the gossip roll! What to me are Hamlet's garters, or the whirlwind of Salome's dance, or the tread of the Man in the Iron Mask? I am more iron than they."

"Prince Charming, prince of the mockers — compared with him the foulest of sinners is grace incarnate..."

"Are the last days near, perhaps? I have forgotten your lessons, prattlers and false prophets, but you haven't forgotten me. As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future — a terrible festival of dead leaves."

"All the mirrors on the wall show a man not yet appeared who could not enter this white hall. He is no better and no worse, but he is free of Lethe's curse: his warm hand makes a human pledge. Strayed from the future, can it be that he will really come to me, turning left from the bridge?"

"Besides what have poets, in any case, to do with sin? They must dance before the Ark of the Covenant or die! But what am I trying to say?"

"In the black sky no star is seen, somewhere in ambush lurks the Angel of Death, but the spices tongues of the masqueraders are loose and shameless A shout: "Make way for the hero!" Ah yes. Displacing the tall one, he will step forth now without fail and sing to us about holy vengeance..."

"Is this the visitor from the wrong side of the mirror? Or the shape that suddenly flitted past my window? Is it the new moon playing tricks, or is someone really standing there again between the stove and the cupboard?"

"This means that gravestones are fragile and granite is softer than wax. Absurd, absurd, absurd! From such absurdity I shall soon turn gray or change into another person. Why do you beckon me with your hand? For one moment of peace I would give the peace of the tomb."

"In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): "Can you describe this?" And I answered: "Yes, I can." Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face."

"For some the wind can fleshly blow, for some the sunlight fade at ease, but we, made partners in our dread, hear but the grating of the keys, and heavy-booted soldiers' tread. As if for early mass, we rose and each day walked the wilderness, trudging through silent street and square, to congregate, less live than dead."

"That was a time when only the dead could smile, delivered from their wars, and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad dangled outside its prison-house..."

"The stars of death stood over us. And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed under the crunch of bloodstained boots, under the wheels of Black Marias."

"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."

"You will come in any case — so why not now? How long I wait and wait. The bad times fall. I have put out the light and opened the door for you, because you are simple and magical. Assume, then, any form that suits your wish, take aim, and blast at me with poisoned shot, or strangle me like an efficient mugger, or else infect me — typhus be my lot —"

"O let the organ, many-voiced, sing boldly, O let it roar like spring's first thunderstorm! My half-closed eyes over your young bride's shoulder Will meet your eyes just once and then no more."

"I go forth to seek — To seek and claim the lovely magic garden Where grasses softly sigh and Muses speak."

"You thought I was that type: That you could forget me, And that I'd plead and weep And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare..."

"You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain."