Poems Are My Link With

But Here, In The Murk Of Conflagration, Where Scarcely A Friend Is Left To Know We, The Survivors, Do Not Flinch From Anything, Not From A Single Blow. Surely The Reckoning Will Be Made After The Passing Of This Cloud. We Are The People Without Tears, Straighter Than You ... More Proud.

Though You Are Three Times More Beautiful Than Angels, Though You Are The Sister Of The River Willows, I Will Kill You With My Singing, Without Spilling Your Blood On The Ground. Not Touching You With My Hand, Not Giving You One Glance, I Will Stop Loving You, But With Your Unimaginable Groans I Will Finally Slake My Thirst. From Her, Who Wandered The Earth Before Me, Crueler Than Ice, More Fiery Than Flame, From Her, Who Still Exists In The Ether— From Her You Will Set Me Free.

In The Terrible Years Of The Yezhov Terror I Spent Seventeen Months Waiting In Line Outside The Prison In Leningrad. One Day Somebody In The Crowd Identified Me . . . And Asked Me In A Whisper . . . "can You Describe This?" And I Said: "i Can."

We Thought: We're Poor, We Have Nothing, But When We Started Losing One After The Other So Each Day Became Remembrance Day, We Started Composing Poems About God's Great Generosity And Our Former Riches.

As The Future Ripens In The Past, So The Past Rots In The Future -- A Terrible Festival Of Dead Leaves.