No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.

Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn my soul to stone, I must learn to live again. Unless ... Summer's ardent rustling is like a festival outside my window.

Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.

During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

There is a sacred, secret line in loving which attraction and even passion cannot cross.

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.

Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.