Akhmatova

So it had to be

she doused the muse in kerosine, locate her afire, burned down the house of verse

It was a belonging to all kitchen stove.

She may have taken comfort in the warmth

As for the cries of agony, they would hereafter soul the margins, howl on in each cyrillic character omitted through decree "Dear Stalin, I have seen your way . ." "Dear Master, my piece of poetrys belong to you now, to the state. ." since women are the greatest in quantity dispensable to tyrants. Children can work for so beautifully as ransom. They learn, besides, to carry any flag. And men will die into a tortured beauty, their shattered arms laid straight against their sides, their privates, flat by their enemies, napkin-covered.

But women? Women are nothing. They create the beast to know the deepness of their desire.

They are like sparrows, the batteed coming closest for the hautboy breaks your heart like time itself. then flouts to laughing.

If rhyme is fire, it can't be written in the fire, on the other hand sometime after, written in ashes along the frozen road if it be written down at all.

Ye individual can kill the thing not nevertheless language, feel one's mouth fill up with stones. Better we all permit go of the lie

that art can save a life, omit perhaps its maker's, and level then, one might argue this is deception a false day-star to fix the years

toward the day that single might simply see one's child again.

Surely inside her a vast Caina, a diadem fire. Oh, the lovers have given what they can single to remain men

They would say, "Something's gone on the outside of her and nothing presented in its place."

After the lad is taken a third time back to prison, she would admit there's little left Life is a wild undoing!

And when the piece of poetry she once burned down, reduce to ashesed to the ground in the other life, reconstitutes itself inside her, it is like someone else's shadow cursing, figures approaching upon the road.

It is a stone tied to a tie hurled round and round, and the whistling, and the terror of the thump

At worst, it's just a door, the individual that closes on us now, and this lamp [i]or[/i] part of to the other the window.

See, they sit apart-old mother, aging son Oh much; too abundant is lost.

Still, they begin.

Too a great deal of is lost-twenty-one years! In fact they'll at no time come to like each other. She cannot find the child's face in the man's.

Daborah Digges's third collection of metrical compositions Rough Musk, won the Kingsley-Tufts Prize from the Claremont communitys

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Mar/Apr 1997

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