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There are Three Periods of Memory Lyrics by Anna Akhmatova

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There are three periods of memory.
The first of them is like a yesterday,
The soul basks in the blessings of their vault,
The body takes its glory in their shade.
Laughter has not yet passed away, tears gush,
The blot is not yet bleached out of the desk,
The kiss, like a heart's seal, is terminal,
Is singular and unforgettable...
But this does not last long before the vault
Has vanished overhead. And in some backwoods
Neighborhood, in a solitary house
Where summers leave the winters' chill warmed over,
Where spiders weave, where all things are in dust,
Where lovestruck letters lead a crumbling half-life,
Sly portraits change into their different selves
Where people go as if to their own grave,
Soaping their fingers pure as they go back
Wiping a fleeting fear out like a sty
From laden eyes, breathing a burdened sigh...
But time, the clock, is ticking and one spring
Yields to another as the skies are flushed,
The cities roll through names, and none remain
As witnesses to what exactly happened.
Gone are the folk we'd weep or reminisce with.
And slowly then the shades go off from us,
Shades we no longer care to summon back,
Whose reemergence would be terrible.
And once we wake we note how we've forgotten
The path back to that solitary house
And, gasping from the anger and the shame,
We bolt there but (as usual in dreams)
It has all changed: the folk, the walls, the things,
And no one knows us there where we are foreign.
A wrong turn took us elsewhere. God almighty!
We come to the most caustic thought of all:
We come to know that we could never fit
The past into the margins of this life,
A past almost as alien to us
As to the folk next door, we do not know
The dear departed from a stranger, people
That God saw fit to separate from us
Did fine without us. Now we even know
That all is for the best....
Credits
Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova

About “There are Three Periods of Memory” by Anna Akhmatova

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"There are Three Periods of Memory" is credited to Anna Akhmatova. Songwriting credits may include additional writers listed on the release; check the credits section on this page for linked collaborators.

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