Dream of Anna

Love curls around my heart
like a snake
on a warm rock
in autumn

There were a few piece that made it into this series--The Dream Suite--that were influenced by other things I was reading at the time. This piece was influenced by Russian Poet Anna Akhmatova's [The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova] poem

Love.

Now, like a little snake, it curls into a ball,
Bewitching your heart,
Then for days it will coo like a dove
On the little white windowsill

Or it will flash as bright frost,
Drowse like a gillyflower...
But surely and stealthily it will lead you away
From joy and from tranquility.

It knows how to sob so sweetly
In the prayer of a yearning violin,
And how fearful to divine it
In a still unfamiliar smile.

I loved the imagery of the first stanza. So sweet. Then the descent into the tortured Russian soul :) . Two great reads on the evolution of the Russian characters. The Moon Goddess and the Son by Donald Kingsbury is a Neal Stephenson-type novel. Big mix of characters and ideas but one of the constant threads is the cold war and a section of the book in a really entertaining way covers the Russian character.

I pretty much only like my history told through fictional narrative, but hey, it works. Russka: The Novel of Russia was excellent, in that regard.