Friday, July 19, 2013

Anna Akhmatova: "Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold"


Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses—
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.



"Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold," by Anna Akhmatova, from Poems of Akhmatova, edited and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. © Little, Brown & Company, 1973.

Image credit: "Cherry Blossoms," colored pencil, by Collin Kasyan.


 

3 comments :

  1. guys it is really hard for me to analysis what does she meant ? what is trying to say

    ReplyDelete
  2. One way to interpret it: Life is full of suffering. But it is also full of wonder. How we experience it depends on what we pay most attention to.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ... singer and songwriter Iris DeMent has a new album in which she set to music a collection of poems by the Russian writer Anna Akhmatova...
    Check out this album and article. I'm an Iris fan and now more people will know about Anna Ahkmatova.

    http://www.npr.org/2015/08/12/431906542/poetry-is-set-to-melody-in-iris-dement-s-the-trackless-woods

    ReplyDelete

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