At dawn they came and took you away. You were my dead: I walked behind. In the dark room children cried, the holy candle gasped for air. - Anna Akhmatova

The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.

He loved three things alone:
White peacocks, evensong,
old maps of America.
He hated children crying,
and raspberry jam with his tea,
and womanish hysteria.
...And then he married me.

1911

But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you … more proud...