Anna Akhmatova
Venice

City of sewers and temples,
standing pale in the cold mud of your dreams,
lording it over the waters, a golden
dovecote—no other city is so beset with birds
as this palace-strew lagoon.

The salt Adriatic breeze
erases, as soon as they’re made,
the narrow tracks of your dark gondolas,
the splashing traffic in your
sweet, hallucinatory-green,
water streets.

All the foreign faces in your throngs
seem somehow friendly; all your shops
are full of brightly colored toys.
High on his marble pillar,
the lion of Saint Mark,
with proprietary paw, holds open,
propped on a dignified pillow, his gospel,.

The sky’s a cool, pale blue, such as you’d find
in an ancient, faded painting of Venice.
Everything here is picture-perfect,
exactly as imagined.
There are crowds, but you don’t feel crowded,
you don’t even notice the humid heat,
you breathe at ease, as if relieved.

Translated by Seraphina Powell