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sunlight.
    Now I wake up to the same four walls staring
    At me blankly, and the same bare ceiling.
    The morning starts over in the home:
    Someone coughs in the hall, someone calls out
    An unfamiliar name, a name I don’t remember,
    Someone slams a car door in the distance.
    I touch my feet to the cold tile floor
    And listen to my neighbor stirring in his room
    And think about my mother’s peculiar words
    After my grandmother died during the war:
    “One day the light will be as thick as a pail
    Of fresh milk, but the pail will seem heavy.
    You won’t know if you can lift it anymore,
    But lift it anyway. Drink the day slowly.”
Leningrad (1941–1943)
    1
    For some of us it began with wild dogs
    Howling iike dirges in the early morning
    And crazed wolves answering in the distance.
    It began with the shrieking of peacocks
    And three mad sables roving through the streets
    And a sound of donkeys screeching like children.
    Some of us heard the polar bears wailing
    And two African giraffes whining in terror
    At the death throes of a baby elephant
    And we knew it had begun in earnest.
    But some people refuse to imagine zebras
    Careening around in hysterical circles,
    Or cheetahs smashing their cages, or bats
    Clinging to crippled leopards and then
    Floating over their heads in a broad light.
    Some people need to see the sky speaking
    German, and the night wearing a steel helmet,
    And the moon slowly turning into a swastika.
    2
    But then we saw the stomach of the city
    Burning in the distance, all the charred
    Sugar and fresh meats, all the white flour
    And dark grains flaming on the far horizon
    In oily black clouds of smoke tinged
    With ember-reds and soiled brown mauves.
    It was like seeing hundreds of waves of
    Blood rolling over the city at dusk and then
    Hanging in heavy layers under the stars.
    No one cried out or screamed in pain
    To see our crumbling wooden depots of food
    Climbing in swollen clouds into the sky
    But a few children who were already hungry
    And an old man who saw his own small intestine
    Drifting like a balloon over his wife’s head.
    That’s how in Peter the Great’s white showcase
    Built on a vast swamp on the northernmost
    Fringe of Europe, we began to starve.
    3
    It’s to lie in the dark at four a.m.
    Thinking about the sweetness of surrender,
    What the mind yields to a mattress in fatigue
    And the body forgets to remember, what
    The reluctant night yields to a cold room
    Where windows are boarded with plywood
    And light searches for a crack in the roof.
    It’s to remember the women with bright parasols
    Strolling down the wide Parisian boulevards
    And the men cruising in black limousines.
    It’s to forget the words “typhoid” and “cholera,”
    The sirens that go on wailing in your sleep.
    There are days when dying will seem as
    Easy as sitting down in a warm, comfortable
    Overstuffed chair and going back to sleep,
    Or lying in bed for hours. But you must
    Not sit down, you must spend your life digging
    Out trenches with a shovel, staying awake.
    4
    So whoever will eat must work and whoever
    Will survive must fight. But the sick
    Civilians shiver on narrow gray stretchers
    In the dark in unheated hospital rooms,
    The soldiers respect the terror of their wounds.
    There is no water, no warmth, and no light
    And the bodies keep piling up in the corridor.
    A red soldier tears his mouth from a bandage
    And announces to a young nurse, “Darling,
    Tanks are what we need now, beautiful tanks,
    Beloved tanks rolling over the barren fields
    And playing their music in the pink sky.”
    No one pays attention, but a volunteer regrets
    That trolleys have stopped running to the front:
    He’ll have to walk the distance. Meanwhile,
    The bodies keep piling up in the corridor
    And a dazed girl keeps shouting, “But I
can
    Fight the Nazis!” Whoever can fight will eat.
    5
    I have lanced the boils on every finger
    And sucked the warm pus; I have eaten
    A thin jelly made of leather straps,
    And swallowed the