Marina Tsvetaeva's Letter to Stalin

Now she takes up the pen in an unsteady hand,knowing that her husband's life depends upon this,

her lone surviving daughter's,Her sixteen years old son's; her own.

Where does one even begin in writing such a letter?Where can she find a copy of the one, sent years before, by Akhmatova?

She stops . . . she starts . . . as one draft follows another.

Now she puts down the pen and walks over to an open windowof the dacha. No one, least of all her, understands this new Russia.

Not long from now she will flee to a colder,more remote part of the country—Yelabuga;where, days later, they will find her hanging body,

Which will be buried in a shallow unmarked grave.

But for now there is a pen, a woman standing solitary by an open windowHer tears: the confluence of the Kama and Toima rivers.