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Ordered a book of Anna Akhmatova #poems on my lunch break. Also rereading Brodsky discuss her: “This is what no researcher of her work can penetrate because we are people of a different culture. We no longer have this ability to correlate events in time and space. This kind of disposition is possible only given a specific degree—not of tranquillity exactly, but of a different biorhythm.

It's not the same glut of events, phenomena, and so forth that has collapsed on us. I think that in prerevolutionary Russia, and even after that whole remarkable revolution, this other rhythm still—at least partly defined a person's existence. That kind of rhythm is a marker of a different era —the turn of the century.”

This comment fascinates me: “a different biorhythm”

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#poetry https://poets.org/poet/anna-akhmatova

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

“Fragment

...And it seemed to me that these fires Were with me until dawn.

And I didn't inquire — what color

Those strange eyes were.

And everything trembled and sang,

And I didn't know —was it winter or summer,

Were you friend or foe?”

June 21, 1959

Moscow