The Soviet authorities permitted

the poet Anna Akhmatova

to travel to Sicily – without

a KGB chaperone – to receive

a literary award in Taormina.

She stayed at the luxury five star hotel

where the ceremony was due to be held.

 

***

 

She had queued every day for seventeen months

to visit her son at the Crosses Prison

in Leningrad. On one occasion

another mother recognised her,

and whispered her name. Another, who had had

no idea who or what she was, asked,

also in a whisper, ‘Can you describe this?’

 

Her poem REQUIEM – dedicated

to the strangers, the chance friends with whom she shared

those months of waiting in purgatory – ends

with the thought of the terror of forgetting

how each day the iron gates of the prison

slammed, and an old woman howled like a beast,

and the horror of only remembering

the cooing, cooing of the prison dove,

and the barges silent on the Neva.

The long poem begins: ‘Leningrad

was a place where only the dead could smile’.

 

***

 

The first night in Taormina she wrote

in her diary: ‘I am almost in

Africa, everything is in bloom

all around, and it glows, it smells. The sea

is shining. Tonight there will be a

poetry reading in the hotel,

tomorrow the conferral of the prize’…

 

…uncowed survivor of censorship,

lyric poet of love and elegy,

laureate of the tangential image,

memorialist of fear and revelation.