! In Memoriam: Anna Akhmatova, Poet

Last Spring I stood in front of the bronze statue they’ve put up in your honour on the banks of the Neva not far from the prison's red wall just as, half in jest, you requested it, never expecting this... the thaw had just started and a white snow crystal, already half transparent, melted in the corner of your bronze eye as if it were a tear I watched it slide down Spring's warming bronze, down past your name on the base, across the trodden snow of the pavement, into the Neva whose memory is time itself, and as it joined the river's flow of breaking, creaking ice and snow the sunlight caught it, briefly. The next day I walked to your dacha in the woods as the first light rain of Spring gently washed the birch saplings and the brown leaves of last autumn now revealed made a silent carpet for my feet; and the pale sunlight caught a raindrop, briefly. In some future Spring a poet’s tears fall as gentle rain.