Anna Akhmatova too
It turns out I missed a trick yesterday - as well as being the anniversary of the death of Patsy Cline it was also the anniversary of the death, in 1966, of Anna Ahkmatova.
Here's the first stanza of In Memory of MB, which could serve as a memorial to the great owoman herself:
Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
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Outside the prison in Leningrad:
"A woman with blue lips standing behind me, who had of course never heard my name, suddenly woke out of the benumbed condition in which we all found ourselves at that time and whispered in my ear (in those days we all spoke in a whisper):
- Can you put this into words?
And I said:
- I can."
Signs, yes, I know, it's incredible - as in the sense of, we can hardly even believe it was like that for people. She's amazing.
She was so beautiful when she was young but I love these pictures of her when she was old, you can just see what she was made of.
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