Anna Akhmatova
Funeral

I am seeking a grave site that’s bright.
Can you help, I am tired and weary?
Open fields get so cold in the night.
Heaps of stones by the sea are so dreary.

She’s so used to the peace she knew prior,
And she loves the rays of the sun,
I will build a small hermitage by her,
As our home for the ages to come.

With two windows, a door in-between,
And an icon lamp always alight,
Like a dark heart, the icon will gleam
With a scarlet-red fire inside.

She was raving, you know, sick in bed,
Of some heavenly place in the blue,
But a monk, reproaching her, said:
“It was not made for sinners like you.”

It was then that she whispered to me,
Turning pale from pain: “Let us go.”
Now alone we are wandering free,
With our feet in the blue surf below.

Translated by Andrey Kneller