This great, much needed poem is a potent antidote to despair.  I’m also using it to celebrate
12 years for Poem of the Month.  According to Kaveh Akbar: “…bewilderment is at the core
of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder.”
Is this, then, why we don’t perhaps despair forever?    

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses —
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

Anna Akhmatova from Poems of Akhmatova, edited and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward.

Copyrighted material, for educational/therapeutic purposes only.

Question for deeper reflection:  What does this poem say to you about despair?  What does this mean to you:
“…the miraculous that comes so close…wild in our breast for centuries?”