(Source)

Well, another National Poetry Month has come and gone.  I had a good time this year, challenging myself to read a poem by Anna Akhmatova every day.  (I didn’t get one in every day, but I did have some days when I read quite a few, so on balance, I finished a selection of her poems and I definitely got to know a new poet.)  Oh, and Peanut got in on the action too, sharing her favorite A.A. Milne poem with you!

Anna Akhmatova was a brilliant talent and an incredibly brave woman.  As I noted in my introductory post, she was one of the only writers who chose not to flee the Soviet Union but instead to remain and bear witness to events there.  The decision cost her: she was in “official disfavor” for much of her life, and was alternately mocked and condemned for her “political indifference” – i.e. choosing to write about age-old themes of love and grief, rather than propaganda.  In reality, Akhmatova was anything but politically indifferent, and quite a few of the poems in the selection I read were love letters to her country – to Russia, that is, and to Russians, not to the Soviet government.  (No wonder she bugged the high-ups.)

For example, on her decision not to join her writing compatriots in exile:

I’m not one of those who left their country
For wolves to tear it limb from limb.
Their flattery does not touch me.
I will not give my songs to them.

Yet I can take the exile’s part,
I pity all among the dead.
Wanderer, your path is dark,
Wormwood is the stranger’s bread.

But here in the flames, the stench,
The murk, where what remains
Of youth is dying, we don’t flinch
As the blows strike us, again and again.

And we know there’ll be a reckoning,
An account for every hour … There’s
Nobody simpler than us, or with
More pride, or fewer tears.

Akhmatova wrote feelingly about her times, but she also wrote on themes like love, which transcend politics.  And she wrote poems from Bible stories and sprinkled literary references throughout her work.  But my favorites were those poems where her use of vivid imagery immortalized the Russia that she knew and loved, like this one:

SEASIDE SONNET

Everything here will outlive me,
Even the houses of the stare
And this air I breathe, the spring air,
Ending its flight across the sea.

Unearthly invincibility…
The voice of eternity is calling,
And the light moon’s light is falling
Over the blossoming cherry-tree.

It doesn’t seem a difficult road
White, in the chalice of emerald,
Where it’s leading I won’t say…

There between the trunks, a streak
Of light reminds one of the walk
By the pond at Tsarskoye.

So.  Another year gone, but a new-to-me poet discovered.  And continuing my trend of posting poems after National Poetry Month has actually ended… although this year I don’t have a big announcement to give you as the conclusion to this post.  But I had a good month, and Peanut and I read lots of poems, and I hope you did too.