Poetry
Akhmatova’s Cenotaph
By Barbara Chase-Riboud
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Anna Akhmatova Monument, St. Petersburg, 1996
Whose victory, was it?
I don’t know.
Perhaps poetry itself?
Certainly, Pushkin and Pasternak were there
A multitude stood before her tomb
Bareheaded in Leningrad’s March winds,
Boys and girls recited her verse by heart
From two or three in the afternoon
Until the light leaped away and darkness crept in
At ten when it was still tricky white night,
And everything shone without the sun
Which wrapped itself around harsh throats congested
With unreleased tears and KGB agents who
Mingled everywhere looking on and taking notes,
The crowd advanced slowly on foot following the cenotaph
Through the miniscule cemetery flanked
By pale hills pierced with black pines
Until it reached a bouquet of Evergreens
Men without hats, women without scarves,
Who dares to disturb them?
They have their rights: the right of grief
The right of vengeance, the right of memory
The right of broken heartedness, the right of
Mothers, sisters, brothers, students all claiming
Relief—against death and oblivion, authority
Censure, terror, oppression and for instruction
Resistance, humanity, the rights of man
The coffin is crowned with ribbons and blossoms,
The air of triumph and victory, the music in everyone’s head is
That of Richter playing Prokofiev’s Possession
All the old women stood straight and tall
Martha Ioudina, Nina Tobidze, Vana Khaltourine
Olga Iriskala, Rita Wright, Mari Petrovych
Marina Tchoukorski, Lydia Tschoukovskïa
Natacha Pavlenka, Frida Vigdorova
Old women with graying hair and ravaged faces
Though they like she had all been beauties,
Aligned like the surrounding cypresses
As dark as death they scrutinized each other
Searching for those already dead ghosts: Boris Osip, Marina
All dead before her, Tsvetaeva a suicide; Mandelstahn hounded
To death by Stalin, Pasternak exiled
Old friends, old enemies, old lovers, old prison mates
Joined in pain, in torture, in mourning, in perfidy
The tiny cemetery packed with the crowd’s sneaking shadows
Overrun the walls and line up in silence as if awaiting
A firing squad—no one cries “long live the Revolution”
But a boy recites Pasternak’s Hamlet
There is no Christian voice—no theologian
As if Akhmatova had not been a Russian Orthodox
Only the verses chanted by heart by young people proved it.
Poem without a hero, Rosary, Plantain, Requiem
KGB agents reappeared like sprouting mushrooms
The fresh tomb yawned and opened its arms
Embracing clumps of deaf and dumb earth
The coffin groaned into its place like a tulip bulb
Under the hail of clay and dirt that blinded all,
“Deafened” as Pushkin would say “by the noise of inner anxiety,”
This solitude is nothing like the solitude of the before,
This solitude is either the ultimate prison or the passage to Paradise
Which will never erase the voice we still hear
From beyond the grave, you hear her voice
And you accord it faith
Whose victory, was it?
I don’t know
Perhaps poetry itself.
–
Barbara Chase-Riboud, the first Black woman to graduate from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in art and architecture, is a critically acclaimed artist, poet and author of historical fiction. Her most recent exhibition, presented concurrently at eight museums across Paris, was on view from September 2024 to January 2025.