Lovely how lives of the great overlap
or just miss. Between Dickinson’s death
and Akhmatova’s birth — a three-year gap.
Dickinson’s ukase: “Tell all the truth
but tell it slant” was in capable hands.
Amherst was always Amherst,
but Akhmatova lived, and her work was banned, in protean St. Petersburg,
renamed Petrograd, then Leningrad,
as war and revolution swamped the land,
but not the soul of this “seaside girl.” She had
“the great Russian word” at her command,
and had actually, to the astonishment
of Dickinson, seen camels in Tashkent.
Would they have talked of lovers? Which hurts most?
Starvation or betrayal and disgust?
Both, though, would have marveled at the little book
a convict in one of Stalin’s gulags made
to hold Akhmatova poems he had by heart,
a fascicle bound with twine, the pages’
coarse paper somehow glued to birchbark.
“The twenty-first. Night. Monday.” the first one starts.