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.
By David Selzer