The Square Where You Once Sang

by Kat Cameron

It’s not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang,
at the empty windows set in the tall house. 
	“Lot’s Wife” —Anna Akhmatova
	translated by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz



Anna, sing your songs of Russia from 
a time woven out of light, the golden age.
One memento hung in your living room— 
Modigliani’s sketch of curving lines, 
a crooked nose and dark fringe of bangs.
Those nights reciting poems in the Stray Dog
beneath a ceiling bright with birds and flowers,
in the prelapsarian years with Gumilov, 
with Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and Pasternak. 
It’s not too late, you can still look back


to Paris in 1911, the silver age.
Because that’s what poets do—look back
and mourn for what is lost, the time
of flowering, of chestnut trees in spring 
when your lover sketched you
naked on a bed. During Stalin’s reign,
you wrote on tiny slips of paper, then burned 
your poems. The only way to hear your thoughts
was to speak in whispers in shabby rooms 
in the red towers of your native home.


The century of death. Snow, ice, blood
on the stones, red walls imprisoning
your son, spies reading your letters,
the gulag where your lover died, 
the age of lead. Now, the young
drink coffee in your name at the museum
in Sheremetev Palace in St. Petersburg,
home of the Lady of Sorrows, your image
printed on every cup, pin, and tote bag
in the square where you once sang


Banned from print in your own country,
you refused to follow others into exile— 
the price for looking back is death. 
The road away is dark and foreign bread
bitter. You watched your lovers take that road.
You remained in a high room in Fountain House—
the Queen of all the Russias weaving 
a shroud of words. You never stopped asking 
for love, watching throngs of hungry ghosts 
in the empty windows set in the tall house. 

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Kat Cameron’s poetry collection Ghosts Still Linger (University of Alberta Press, 2020) won the High Plains Book Award for poetry in 2021 and was a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. Her collection of short stories, The Eater of Dreams (Thistledown Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She has published poems, short stories, and reviews in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Arc Poetry Magazine, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, and Vallum. She lives on Treaty 6 territory and teaches creative writing at Concordia University of Edmonton.