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Sunday
Victoria Jones at Art and Theology alerted me to this Ana Akhmatova poem. It’s all the more powerful when you realize that the Russian poet lived through two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Stalin regime. She saw her first husband executed by the Soviet police, her common law second husband die in the Gulag, and her son get imprisoned there as well. Yet she passed up opportunities to emigrate, choosing instead to stay and report on what she witnessed.
In other words, when she writes that “Death’s great black wing scrapes the air” and that “Misery gnaws to the bone,” she knows what she’s talking about. And yet, there’s a reason why we do not despair. Cherry blossoms and a sky that glitters with new galaxies remind us that there is more to life than suffering. This miraculous world comes “so close to the ruined, dirty houses.”
The deepest part of ourselves knows this. The knowledge has been “wild in our breast for centuries.”
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.
