Let my heiress have full rights, Live in my house, sing songs that I composed. Yet how slowly my strength ebbs, How the tortured breast craves air. The love of my friends, my enemies' rancor And the yellow roses in my bushy garden, And a lover's burning tenderness—all this I bestow upon you, messenger of dawn. Also the glory for which I was born, For which my star, like some whirlwind, soared And now falls. Look, its falling Prophesies your power, love and inspiration. Preserving my generous bequest, You will live long and worthily. Thus it will be. You see, I am content, Be happy, but remember me.

Thomas; Penguin Classics; ISBN 0-14-042464-4
2009 Selected Poems Trans. She regularly read to soldiers in the military hospitals and on the front line; indeed her later pieces seem to be the voice of those who had struggled and the many Anna Akhmatova has outlived. Akhmatova was able to meet some of her pre-revolutionary acquaintances in 1965 when Anna Akhmatova was allowed to travel to Sicily and England in order to receive the Taormina prize and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University accompanied by her lifelong friend and secretary Lydia Chukovskaya.

Akhmatova's first husband Nikolai Gumilev was executed by the Soviet secret police and her son Lev Gumilev and her third husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag where Punin died. Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (June 23 [O. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry.