Yellow

Found these lines in Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels : "You're many years late,/ How happy I am to see you". I googled for the entire poem and found this :



Broad and yellow is the evening light, by Anna Akhmatova (1915)


Broad and yellow is the evening light,

The coolness of April is dear.
You, of course, are several years late,
Even so, I'm happy you're here.

Sit close at hand and look at me,
With those eyes, so cheerful and mild:
This blue notebook is full, you see,
Full of poems I wrote as a child.

Forgive me, forgive me, for having grieved
For ignoring the sunlight, too.
And especially for having believed
That so many others were you.

the demon of speed

Distance has collapsed and time shattered,
the demon of speed has put its feet on the peaks
of the highest mountains and diverted the brooks,
poisoned seeds fell on the earth,
poisoned fluid flew in the branches.
The powerful tribe of humans has died out,
all knew that the end was imminent.

Anna Akhmatova, 1960

Gift

Here Is My Gift

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.

Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.