| And I grew up in patterned tranquility
In the cool nursery of the new century.
And the voice of man was not dear to me,
But the voice of the wind I could understand.
‘Willow’ Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschmeyer
The sibilant wind predicted a latish spring.
Bare birches leaned and whispered over the gravel path.
Only the river ever left. Still, someone would bring
back a new sailor middy to wear in the photograph
of the four of us. Sit still, stop fidgeting.
— Like the still-leafless trees with their facility
for lyric prologue and its gossipy aftermath,
I liked to make up stories. I liked to sing;
was encouraged to cultivate that ability.
And I grew up in patterned tranquility.
In the single room, with a greasy stain like a scar
from the gas-fire’s fumes, when any guest might be a threat
(and any threat was a guest — from the past or the future)
at any hour of the night, I would put the tea things out
though there were scrap-leaves of tea, but no sugar,
or a lump or two of sugar but no tea.
Two matches, a hoarded cigarette:
my day’s page ashed on its bier in a bed-sitter.
No godmother had presaged such white nights to me
in the cool nursery of the young century.
The human voice distorted itself in speeches,
a rhetoric that locked locks and ticked off losses.
Our words were bare as that stand of winter birches
while poetasters sugared the party bosses’
edicts (the only sugar they could purchase)
with servile metaphor and simile.
The effects were mortal, however complex the causes.
When they beat their child beyond this thin wall, his screeches,
wails and pleas were the gibberish of history,
and the voice of man was not dear to me.
Men and women, I mean. Those high-pitched voices —
how I wanted them to shut up! They sound too much
like me. Little machines for evading choices,
little animals, selling their minds for touch.
The young widow’s voice is only hers. She memorizes
the words we read and burn, nights when we read and
burn with the words unsaid, hers and mine, as we watch
and are watched, and the river reflects what spies. Is
the winter trees’ rustling a code to the winter land?
But the voice of the wind I could understand.
The editors are indebted to Ruth Borthwick, Head of Literature and
Talks at the Royal Festival Hall, who commissioned this poem for the 2004
Poetry International.
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