Broad Gold, The Evening

by ANNA AHKMATOVA (1889-1966)

Broad gold, the evening colors glow,
The April air is cool and tender.
You should have come ten years ago,
And yet in welcome I surrender.

Come here, sit closer in our nook,
And turn gay eyes at what my nurses
Might never glimpse: the blue-bound book
That holds my awkward childish verses.

Forgive me that I did not look
Sunward with joy, but dwelt with sorrow,
Forgive me all whom I mistook
For you, oblivious of the morrow.

Born Anna Gorenko in Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, Anna Ahkmatova chose a pseudonym when writing poetry to assure her father, a naval engineer, that she would not dishonor the family as a “decadent poetess.”

Anna Ahkmatova Contemporaries
Ezra Pound
Sara Teasdale
T. S. Eliot
Jorge Luis Borges