Akhmatova

One may be perfectly convinced that the state is wrong,
but one is seldom confident of one’s own virtue. — Joseph Brodsky

I
Akhmatova haunts my dreams.
Heart and flesh
Set against Empire with its
Files, bureaucracies, guns,
Razor wire and gulags.

She lurks in my dreams,
A shadow over
A tiny life with its
Tiny problems and
Tinier hopes.
And I feel small,
Hardly human.

She troubles my dreams,
And sometimes I wonder
About her hopes and dreams
Before troubles begot
By clumsy ideology and
Finessed consciences
In boots and uniforms
Armed with memoranda and statute,
Fearful a dereliction of duty
Would lead East.

Once upon a time
I chanced in Russian
To read a little of Requiem.
A strange alphabet
With stranger sounds
For grief beyond reckoning,
And still,
She found the words
When challenged
To tell the grief
For a hundred million
Left unspoken.

She disturbs my dreams
And I wonder, did she
Know doubt? Or,
Were doubts kindling
For what had to be said?
Or a bitter necessity,
Lest Mother Russia herself groan
In terror and anguish
For the unspoken,
Though she never had before.
Not once.

II
We trust in words,
Words too big to ever tell a lie.
A nation of laws, but not of men,
Finds the law protection
Against conscience, and
A balm for outraged scruples,
and a soporific for a heart
Ill at ease,
Unable to find words
To fend for itself,
When duty calls.