Anna Akhmatova
On my knees at sunrise...

On my knees at sunrise in the vegetable patch,
humming a love song, yanking out goosefoot,
tossing the stalks: they’ve tiny clustered flowers,
velvet blue-gray leaves shaped amazingly
like real geese feet.
Forgive me, pretty weeds!

I look up: by the rustic fence
woven from branches and twigs,
a barefoot girl is crying.
Her high clear voice of painful fear
is harrowing. The scent
of the goosefoot’s murdered stems
gets more intense in the sun-warmed air.

“What man is there of you, who, if his son
ask bread, will he give him a stone?”
That’s the hard prize my deliberate deafness
will earn me. Above, there’s only cloudless sky,
and all I can hear is that little girl’s cry.

Translated by Seraphina Powell