White Nights Burning
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.
From ‘Requiem’ by Anna Ahkmatova
No-one I love has been taken away at dawn
I have never had to follow
leaving my children crying in the dark
I have not spent any of my life in prison queues
nor listened to the turn of keys
the tread of marching soldiers
nor have I ever wished for miracles
in a Siberian blizzard
Leningrad, flapping worthless its short songs of farewell
Compared with this,
have never known suffering
I have never, like her, keened my grief with the wives
of the murdered streltsy
beneath the Kremlin towers
or before that, arrested a painter’s eye
attained such poise as this woman
in front of a landscape that was already splintered