I hear always the sad voices of summer passing like red winged birds over the high grass - Anna Akhmatova

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

And this tenderness was not like
That which a certain poet
At the beginning of the century called true
And, for some reason, quiet. No, not at all—
It rang out, like the first waterfall,
It crunched like the crust of bluish ice
And it prayed with a swanlike voice,
And it broke down right before our eyes.

And you, my friends who have been called away,
I have been spared to mourn for you and weep,
not as a frozen willow over your memory,
but to cry to the world the names of those who sleep.
What names are those!
I slam shut the calendar,
down on your knees, all!
Blood of my heart,
the people of Leningrad march out in even rows,
the living, the dead: fame can't tell them apart.