Anna Akhmatova

When they are burying the century,
The mournful psalm doesn’t arise,
She will be ornamented sadly
By nettle’s and thistle’s green mass.
And just undertakers are hurried,
Because their dark business doesn’t wait,
And it is so quiet, so quiet,
That clearly heard is the time’s tread.
And she to the surface comes farther,
A corpse – in a river of flood…
A son won’t cognize his dead mother,
A grandson will take off his sight,
And all heads are drooped in deep sadness,
A pendulum-moon goes by.

Like that, over once perished Paris,
Such silence hangs now in sky. 


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, July, 2002