Welcome, traveler! Enter and take your rest...

A chaikhana is a teahouse along the legendary Silk Road pilgrimage and trading route linking China to the Middle East and Europe. It is a place of rest along the journey, a place to shake off the dust of the road, to sip tea, and to gather together to sing songs of the Divine...


A land not mine, still

by Anna Akhmatova
English version by Jane Kenyon

A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.

-- from Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, Edited by Jane Hirshfield

/ Image by Mohamed Nohassi /

View All Poems by Anna Akhmatova


In honor of Navratri, the Hindu festival of nine nights in honor of the feminine face of God, I was thinking of selecting a poem dedicated to the Mother Goddess by Ramprasad or Kamalakanta, but then I thought I should select something by a female poet. As I started scanning through the women poets on the Poetry Chaikhana, I realized that it has been far too long since I last highlighted a poem by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Her writing and her life embody so much of the strength of women in a complex and often harsh world, while courageously retaining a vision of the inner life and the aspirations of the human spirit.


This is a favorite poem of mine from Anna Akhmatova. Though she wrote during some of the bleakest times of Soviet Russia, there are moments of radiant -- one might even say, transcendent -- joy that emerges in her poems.

A land not mine, still
forever memorable...

There is something of the mystic's experience in these lines. An ocean. Light. Deep rest and the sense of life. A brilliant white. Wine...

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine...

Soon, you find yourself asking, Is the day ending, or the world? Ultimately, it is you who are ending. The train of mental chatter has come to a halt. The world and what you called yourself are not as you thought at all, and both are new and alive and too vast to be called your own.

Then you know that the secret of secrets is within you. And it is so deeply familiar you must have known it before, and it is there again.

I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.


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/ Photo by Maria Hossmar /

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