Secrets of the craft

               my translation, based on the poem by Anna Ahkmatova (1899-1966)

		I do not need the odic armies, and the elegiac beauty of ploys. For me, in the poems all should be amiss, not about the human joy. If you only knew, from whence poems grow, without shame, like the yellow dandelion by the fence, like burdock and sesame. An angry shout, the smell of fresh tar, the mysterious mold on the wall... And the verse sounds perky, tender to the delight of all.