To Anna Akhmatova
It seems to me I’ll pick out words that fit
Your nonpareil originality,
And if I get them wrong – so what?
I’ll keep my errors, come what may.
I hear the murmuring speech of drenched roofs,
Silenced eclogues sunk in woodblock cobbles.
Manifest from the first lines, a town
Resounds and grows with every syllable.
Springtime around us, yet we can’t go out.
Some miserly employer won’t relent.
Hunched over her sewing, dawn burns,
Tear in her eyes from work by light of a lamp.
She’ll breathe the smooth space of a great lake,
Speed to the water, fight her own flagging.
But nothing’s profited from such excursions.
Canals smell of mould of mildewed packaging.
Dipping along them like an empty nutshell,
Hot wind flicks the lashes
Of stars and branches, street-lamps and land-marks
And bridge with seamstress gazing into distance.
The sharpness of an eye will often vary,
Images can be apt in various ways.
But a potion of the most dread potency
Is night’s distance under a white night’s gaze.
This is how I see your face, your look –
Not prompted by the pillar of salt you used,
Five years ago, to fasten onto verse
Your fear when looking back,
No, but beginning with your earliest books
And all their sharp-eyed grains of prose, your look
Makes everything that’s in them pulse with truth –
The way a wire makes sparks.
Translated by Angela Livingstone
Page(s) 112-113
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The