owldy:

Nathan Altman. Portrait of Anna Akhmatova. 1914. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

(via)

Cleopatra

She has already kissed Antony’s dead lips,

already wept on her knees before Augustus…

and her servants have betrayed her. Trumpets

cry below Roman eagles, the gloom of dusk.

Noble and stately, stammering with confusion

now enters the last prisoner of her beauty,

‘You – like a slave…

.             he’ll lead me in triumph before him…’

but her swanlike neck still bends peacefully.

Tomorrow her children. O, what littleness

is left to do on earth – only toy with this fool,

and, indifferently, like a parting kindness

lay the black snake to her dark breast too.

-Anna Akhmatova, 1940