After leaving Anna Ahktamova's house on the Fourth of July

Back in the time when people had souls they wrote poetry.

Not all of them, but some of them.

Some of them, the ones who didn't write poetry, listened to the poems as if they'd written the poems themselves, even if they couldn't read or write.

Poetry was a real part of things then, almost like air or the sun.

Best of all nobody needed proof of God. That's what rivers and maple trees were for, to say nothing of birth and death the poets wrote about.

To this day no one's sure what happened or who it was who made the decision to make poets and poetry so separate from life that they could be brought up on charges of being its mortal enemy.

Who, for instance, commanded that Anna Ahkmatova appear before her bedroom window every morning to prove to the police that she existed as a person, that she hadn't attempted the heroic exit of suicide, and that she wasn't writing poems that endangered each and every one of us who were living as we were expected to live?

It wasn't the people who had souls of course, it was the other people who did things like sending poets to jail for life or killing them altogether.

Lucky for those who loved poetry that the others never figured out a way to put a poem in jail, though sometimes it seems as if they'll never stop trying.