for Anna Akhmatova
This winter
I’ll come see you
every weekend
till you’re gone.
I’ll climb Midtown Library’s
twenty marble steps
enter glass and wood revolving door
cross patterned marble floor
to exhibition room’s dim light
and your slender window
between John Peter Zenger and Gandhi.
Your angled poster
ripples with ringlets
of natural wood
uncensored by coatings
of charcoal-grey paint.
Your name imprinted
in burnished brown
crowns blue-grey type
revealing your tragedy:
How sly Lenin killed Kolya
and stone-faced Stalin chained Lev
for sin of escaping your womb.
How you wrote stale
state words to save your only child.
How you burned your own verses
to avoid their capture…
But the curator does not say:
How at age 25
already “Anna of all the Russias”
you cried near Blue Bridge
over Moika River
the first time you heard
students chorus your “Rosary.”
How Leningrad’s people
remembered you
tower tall
in exploding streets
gas mask slung
over broad shoulder
as you pointed routes
to air raid shelters.
How crammed deep
in damp tunnels
someone would rise
from huddled corners
ignore bombs’ earthquake
and recite above cries
your poem “Courage.”
How in frozen yard
far away from spies
you would whisper new poems
to your closest friend:
memory and word-of-mouth
your only publisher.
How Nobel judges
feared Kruschev’s pounding shoe.
How you and the Muse
outlived the brutes
and how in old age
young poets flocked to you
like freezing hands to warm fire…
To the right in your window
your half-shadowed face
in photo from “Planeta”
portrays illusive calm.
At your window’s left base
the hardbound book
with burgundy cover
printed by Moscow 1958
is opened to “Voronezh”:
your poem for Mandelstam
void of last verse
by a censor’s soiled blade.
You gracefully give back the lines:
Russian letters in pen’s blue ink
flow thin to thick and back again
seep and spread into white parchment
preserving your hand’s sure motion
and words no tyrant could stomach:
“In the room of the banished poet
fear and the Muse stand watch by turn,
and the night is coming on
which has no hope of dawn.
1936 March”
Dearest Anna
this winter
I’ll come see you
every weekend
till you’re gone.
Roger Armbrust
November 1995
