bellswithin-blog:

Handmade prisoner’s notebook with this Anna Akhmatova poem committed to memory:

The twenty-first. Night. Monday.
The outlines of the capital are in mist.
Some idler invented the idea  
That there’s something in the world called love.

And from laziness or boredom,
Everyone believed it and here is how they live:
they anticipate meetings, they fear partings
And they sing the songs of love.

But the secret will be revealed to the others,
And a hush will fall on them all . . .
I stumbled on this by accident
And since then have been somehow unwell.

1917
Petersburg

From The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (trans. Judith Hemschemeyer; ed. Roberta Reeder). (Somerville, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 2000).

(via blazeofgold)