The poems of Anna Akhmatova felt like a hard sell at the eastern edge of Zuccotti Park this afternoon. It was another idyllic day, warm with the warmth that feels so poignant this late in the season, especially when you’re thinking about how hard it will be to sleep out in a concrete-covered plaza once the weather turns, and I’d walked down from Grand Street, through Columbus Park, because I’d gotten absorbed in Akhmatova on the B train and missed my transfer to the R at DeKalb. Columbus Park was packed full of people, mostly Chinese and elderly, many of them playing board games at square built-in tables. On benches lining the walkways, someone was playing an erhu in a duet with an instrument that looked something like a banjo. My irritation at not getting to Occupy Wall Street by a more efficient route quickly evaporated.

The thing about Akhmatova is that her most clearly “political” work–the type of stuff you automatically want to read in the public square–is so specific to Russia during the Soviet era. In my view, that doesn’t make it any less applicable to New York City in 2011, but it’s perhaps not as easy an act of translation. Yet when I read, from “Requiem,” the passages about relatives of political prisoners standing endlessly in lines to deliver packages to their loved ones, I thought of the prison-industrial complex, and the torture-by-solitary-confinement that’s being visited on so many thousands in U.S. prisons, and felt the words more vividly than I ever have before. And especially when I read, “Why is this age worse than earlier ages?/In a stupor of grief and dread/have we not fingered the foulest wounds/and left them unhealed by our hands?” (Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973), it seemed as though the poet were speaking directly to us across all the distances of time, geography, and culture.

I had a rather long conversation with a man who stopped to listen for a while, nodding gravely at my comments about the U.S. prison system–a dark-skinned black man, neither old nor young, who said he’d come down here to tell the people his view of the situation: we’re in more trouble than we realize. There are a lot of things the government isn’t telling us; in fact, in his view, we’re in the midst of a Great Depression. He constantly prefaced his comments with, “I’m not saying you agree with me, but….” In fact, though, I did agree with much of what he had to say, yet his style was such that I periodically expected him to arrive at some culminating point–perhaps an apocalyptically-oriented religious one. It never quite happened, though the warning tone was there. “These police standing around here–they don’t realize, their jobs can get cut! This is just the beginning. You think this is bad. There could be enough jobs all over the world, but they don’t want it like that. They gambled with people’s money, but they won’t tell you that. They want to pay you seven, eight, nine dollars an hour. They don’t want to pay you eighteen, twenty dollars!” Amen. Later, I wove my way through the park with considerable difficulty, given the crowding–past a printed notice reading, TOURISTS NOT PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT BY ORDER OF MANAGEMENT, past the impressive kitchen area with huge dishpans full of washed pots and pans. A woman asked if she could take a picture of my sign and thanked me for being there. A man handed me a flier for a march later that afternoon, with the slogan “No more NYPD violence against #OccupyWallStreet, LGBT New Yorkers and Communities of Color!” A man looked at my sign (BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF) and said, “I think we’re hanging off that cliff by just the back wheels, and a couple of little rocks are all that’s holding us in place, and those rocks are gonna be the next to go.”

The other day, I saw a video clip of a sermon that Reverend Billy gave sometime in the last week. (I think it was during the Saturday march to shame the banks.) He said something I really liked, which I will try to paraphrase: “This isn’t about hope. For one thing,  Barack Obama ruined that word. We’re not hoping for anything. This is what we’re about. This is it, right here.”