1. Long, empty days flee into the past. No agenda. No impulse. No telos. No soul.
My whitewashed angel claps her silver hands. I hear a dead manβs cry sink slowly in the sands.
A mortar round pounds the trenches at Verdun. His heart stopped, Edward Thomas blinks and falls. Robert Frost tosses an apple across the mending wall.
2. Akhmatova mourns a faithless love. Stalin disfigures her features with a blood-stained dove.
Poetry extends beyond the horizon of time. Its foundation transcendental, its meat image and rhyme.
3. Empty days escape into the ticking void: a metronome made meaningless, a vacuum of joy.
Seeds sprout inside a driveway. Dirt blackens in the rain.
Now knows no start or finish. Eternity tightens its grip in vain.
Edward Thomas was a talented English poet who died in World War I. Anna Akhmatova is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century.