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