National Poetry Month 2016

April is National Poetry Month here in the US and this year marks the 20th anniversary of the celebration. I thought that in order to commemorate that I would post a poem every day here on the blog.

My first poem is one that has stuck in my mind since college. I read it during my Russian lit studies and never quite forgot about it even though the exact words blurred a bit in my memory. The opening line is so evocative that I could never entirely let go of it:
Your lynx-eyes, Asia,
spy on my discontent;
they lure into the light
my buried self,
something the silence spawned,
no more to be endured
than the noon sun in Termez.
Pre-memory floods the mind
like molten lava on the sands…
as if I were drinking my own tears
from the cupped palms of a stranger’s hands.

-Anna Akhmatova (Translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward)