Anna Akhmatova was one of a rare breed. A Soviet “silver age” poet to survive Stalin’s purges. During years of repression, her works were passed among fans and fellow poets by the system of samizdat (self publication).
lyrics
Anna wrote me a letter back in 1939
She parcelled it up in meter, and wrapped it up in rhyme
and sent it off to the future - to another, better time.
I received the letter much later, round about 1962
from a barely known acquaintance at the back of a butcher’s queue
One of my former students, who simply said, “This one’s for you”
It burned a hole in my breast as I walked home with my parcel of liver
A forbidden note - a gift from an excommunicant giver
A spark, a gem a letter of love from Anna Akhmatova
And you out west, with free love and free music and museums and paperbacks. Ain’t it strange that you never read and ain’t it strange that you think that poetry’s for losers? And you pick your songs by a random X. But beggars can’t be choosers
And where poetry is treason and passed on at night
by a love letter - a love letter - a love letter. Samizdat.
In fact, I met Anna once, many years ago. It was late afternoon, the room already dark. So - let me tell you how it was.
Close your eyes. Sit back, and just imagine...
She takes a piece of coarse, lined paper from a solid wooden desk. All the furniture was heavy, brown and ugly in those days. She primes her pen and starts to write: the poem draws the nib across the page in elegant cursive script. Punctuating with a final stop, she hands the note to me: saying, “Take, eat”. I taste and read and her verse explodes in my mouth like a fine Georgian wine. A bouquet of anticipation, a robust body and a slightly bitter aftertaste. Or like the choicest Astrakhan caviar - each strophe rounded and full and ripe to burst its salty juice within my willing mind.
And then the time is gone.
Anna hands me an ashtray and a splintery red-tipped match. I set the flame to the paper and watch the brown, curling edge of combustion
eat up her words and convert them to cinders and to a single spark that hesitantly floats up to the ornate, heavily-plastered ceiling of her quarters,
to lodge itself deep under my hair and between my ears.
Ikra - Iskra - A spark of samizdat.
And now the letters keep coming from my modest web of friends
As fruits upon a vine of truth towards the sunlight tend
Grown from a mind of beauty, towards an unknown end
A letter last month from Marina and then one from Pasternak
From Venedikt Yerofeev and a voice from the distant gulag
Fragile paper fire bombs lit by the spark of samizdat.
credits
released November 17, 2020
Spoken vox: Tony
Vox, guitars, acoustic bass, percussion: Dave Banks
Mixed and mastered by Tom Nash
Radio effect in “Samizdat” by BBC/BBC.ECD69b/PSE.
Features a melody fragment by the very Modest Mussorgsky.
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