Poem by Marilyn Hacker -- posted with permission

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Re: permission to post poem by Akhmatova
Friday, June 12, 2009 2:44 AM
From:
Marilyn Hacker
Dear Kyi May -- Yes, you may post it on your blog, properly identified. I am very moved that you found it relevant... But it is NOT a poem by Akhmatova, it is a "glosa" that I wrote myself, taking its source in the four lines by Akhmatova, from her poem "Willow," that are quoted at the beginning. It is a poem ABOUT Akhmatova, of course, or someone very like her, and the incidents in the poem are described in her writings, or in biographies and memoirs of her by other people (memorizing her new poems at night with a friend -- here, a young woman named Lydia Chukovskaya, who wote about the experience later-- and then burning the only existent written copy in the ashtray).

The poem was published in the United States in the magazine "New Letters," and will be in my new book, NAMES, to be published by W.W. Norton in November of this year.

Best
Marilyn

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Kyi May Kaung wrote:

Dear Marilyn,

I know of you through your poetry and through Ram at Rattapallax. You once chose my recording of my poem inspired by Neruda.

I wanted to ask you if I may post this poem by Akhmatova on my blog

http://kyimaykaung.blogspot.com

It is so like the situation in Burma right now, and young people from Burma read my blog.

I think this poem will give them strength.

Also, what is a GLOSE and a GLOSA.

Sincerely,

Kyi May

Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:32:03 +0200
From: Marilyn Hacker
Subject: here is a Glosa, on four lines from Akhmatova


GLOSE

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.

Anna Akhmatova
translated by Judith Hemschmeyer


A sibilant wind presaged 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:
I 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 just hers, as 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.


Copyright MARILYN HACKER