All that I am hangs by a thread tonight - Anna Akhmatova

All my contemporaries — hundred-and-fivers or convicts — will tell you how we lived
in barely sentient fear, raising
children for the executioner,
prison, or the torture chamber.

We learned not to meet anymore,
We don't raise our eyes to one another,
But we ourselves won't guarantee
What could happen to us in an hour.

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.