the miraculous comes so close…

a sketch of Akhmatova by Amedeo Modigliani, 1911

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I don’t read novels or essays to pass the time … don’t watch films so I can be entertained … not music … and not poetry.

I read poetry so I can witness a rip in the universe. I read poetry to change my life. So I change my life daily – a shattering free of my static moment. And the moment is all I have.

Anna Akhmatova understands. Her words have their own flight pattern.

“Everything Is Plundered…”

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses—
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

                                                 – 1921

(Trans. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward)