But here, in the murk of conflagration,
where scarcely a friend is left to know
we, the survivors, do not flinch
from anything, not from a single blow.
Surely the reckoning will be made
after the passing of this cloud.
We are the people without tears,
straighter than you … more proud...

I am not one of those who left the land..." (1922), translated in Poems of Akhmatova (1973) by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward