But I am not allowed to forget The taste of the tears of yesterday. - Anna Akhmatova

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!"

We never quite learned to part,
-We wander slowly side by side.
Outside it’s starting to get dark,
I’m silent, - you’re preoccupied.

We’ll enter a church and we’ll see
Baptisms, marriages, mass.
A minute later, we’ll leave…
Why is everything different with us?

Or we’ll sit on the trampled snow
In a dark cemetery and sigh,
With a stick in your hand, you’ll draw
A palace for just you and I.

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.