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.

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