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

But at this moment he surely knows sorrow
No less than the wise and the old.
It seems that his eyes have begun to grow narrow,
And their brilliant light is now cold.

You invented me. There is no such earthly being,
Such an earthly being there could never be.
A doctor cannot cure, a poet cannot comfort—
A shadowy apparition haunts you night and day.
We met in an unbelievable year,
When the world's strength was at an ebb,
Everything withered by adversity,
And only the graves were fresh.
Without streetlights, the Neva's waves were black as pitch,
Thick night enclosed me like a wall ...
That's when my voice called out to you!
Why it did—I still don't understand.
And you came to me, as if guided by a star
That tragic autumn, stepping
Into that irrevocably ruined house,
From whence had flown a flock of burnt verse.

Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn my soul to stone, I must learn to live again— Unless ... Summer's ardent rustling Is like a festival outside my window.