Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue. - Anna Akhmatova

Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn's approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven't faded yet.

In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.

But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,
From her shing head they will flutter
And fall—and before her
They will die, faintly fragrant still.

And, impelled by faithful longing,
My obedient gaze will feast upon them—
With a reverent hand,
Love will gather their rotting remains.

As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future — a terrible festival of dead leaves.

Lot's Wife

And the just man trailed God's messenger,
his huge, light shape devoured the black hill.
But uneasiness shadowed is wife and spoke to her:
'It's not too late, you can look back still

At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you,
the square in which you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows of that upper storey
where children blessed your happy marriage-bed.'

Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
of pain shot through them, were instantly blind;
her body turned into transparent salt,
and her swift legs were rooted to the ground.

Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she never will be lost,
she who gave up her life to steal one glance.

1922-24