On Women and Land

Lot's Wife

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,

over a black mountain, in his giant track,

while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:

"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,

the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,

at the empty windows set in the tall house

where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain

stitching her eyes before she made a sound...

Her body flaked into transparent salt,

and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem

too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Anna Akhmatova's passion is the most striking aspect of her poetry. A defense of Lot's wife--this is wonderful--what is so wrong with a desire for the past that it makes Lot's wife, in the present, disappear? I think Akhmatova identifies with Lot's wife because both women were concerned with their place. Akhmatova, for example, refuses to be exiled from her land, as we can see in another poem she wrote right around that time, the first line of which translates, "I am not one of those who left the land." Speaking of women who won't leave their land, this makes me think also of Scarlett in Gone With the Wind. I wonder if there is a particular attachment of women to the land or if women attach differently to home and land (i.e. they attach concretely rather than abstractly).