Anna Akhmatova - There are Three Periods of Memory lyrics

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 pa**ed 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....