Poem-a-Day | Daytime Begins with a Line by Anna Akhmatova

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 1, 2014   Daytime Begins with a Line by Anna Akhmatova   Yusef Komunyakaa

The round, hanging lanterns, lit faces in a window of the Marble Palace Catherine the Great built for a lover, with the Field of Mars below, snow falling inside two minds. One translated Babylonian folktales so the other could stand in line early morning for bread at the House of Scholars. A touch of dawn was again nightfall, their room furnished with scattered papers, rare books, a couch with springs poking out, a bookcase, a floral pitcher, a china cabinet, a naked light bulb dangling over a table. Did the two poets learn it took more to sing & reflect the burning icy stars of poetry where privilege & squalor lived beneath the same ornate ceiling? Did they tiptoe from the wintery dusk of the servants’ wing, follow the pseudo- Gothic stairs up to the forbidden aromas of Turkish tobacco, sugar, & exotic teas? Sometimes, they kept themselves warm with talk of the empress’s love of horses as they galloped another century. Then, sketches of their time at the Stray Dog lit the air around those neoclassic nights, & maybe they also spoke about “Venice rotting with gold” near the Arctic Circle, & anger almost kept them warm on days they bent over pages of snow-blindness where tears brought them to laughter.           Copyright © 2014 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “‘Daytime Begins with a Line by Anna Akhmatova’ addresses a number of polarities as we think about class and its relationship to the creation of art, especially when considering Akhmatova’s apt critique of old world postures through an astute modernist lens. When she lived at the Marble Palace with her second husband, Vladimir Shileiko, one cannot overlook the fact she produced few poems in those years, perhaps because of their dire situation or her husband’s reductive attitude toward her poetry. Shileiko translated Babylonian text, and Akhmatova stood in line through hours of cold at the House of Scholars on Millionnoya Street for food. The poem appears in my forthcoming collection The Emperor of Water Clocks.” —Yusef Komunyakaa   Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of The Chameleon Couch: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). He teaches at New York University. Most Recent Book by Komunyakaa   The Chameleon Couch: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) "Occasioned by General Washington's Arrival in Philadelphia, on His Way to His Residence in Virginia" by Philip Freneau "Longing to Commodious" by Rob Halpern "Indian Stream Republic" by Stephen Burt Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.  Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit poets.org   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038