Arrived! #poem by Anna Akhmatova

“The Summer Garden

I want to visit the roses in that unique garden, Fenced by the world's most magnificent fence,

Where the statues remember me as young, And I remember them under the Neva's waters.

In the fragrant silence among majestic linden trees, I imagine the creaking of masts of ships.

And the swan, as before, floats across centuries,

Admiring the beauty of its twin.

And sleeping there, like the dead, are hundreds of

thousands of footsteps

Of friends and enemies, enemies and friends.

And the procession of shades is endless, From the granite vase to the door of the palace.

My white nights whisper there

About some grand and mysterious love.

And everything glows like jasper and mother-of-pearl, But the source of the light is mysteriously veiled.”

July 9, 1959

Leningrad