“You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.”
― Anna Akhmatova

I can hardly speak but I will try:
My brain falls silent, still
I drown my stutter with my will.
In the dying of the light
I am confused by a ferment of tenses;
These lead me up many blind alleys.
Until this night, lingeringly, I spy
A lonesome moonlit-face,
Eyes mirror the sparkling frost,
And then she’s gone, but never lost.
Suspicious of the silence offered me
I walk outside again: all is wild,
Sky, the colour of blood,
Soaks up all the time I have left.
On a barge meandering down the Neva,
On a bright mid-summer morn,
I hear peals of girlish laughter
Echoing from the grassy banks.
I see, passing under bridges, ladies
Quiver, like their parasols; men in top hats,
Like well-paid actors in a film about rivers,
Over balance and fall into the placid water,
One after another as if this was a deliberate
Act of mass suicide. Which it is.
Bodies splash, water mixes with the sweet scent
Of grass newly cut, and just
Forty-two years old and gloriously confused, £
She removes her shoes and happily remembers
That wildfires can’t be bought or sold and so
Her yearning to be born, finally, grows old.