Requiem by Anna Akhmatova (1963)

Outside a Leningrad prison, a woman has stood in the same line for seventeen months, holding a parcel for a son who may already be dead, when the woman beside her, lips blue with cold, whispers, "Can you describe this?" and Akhmatova answers, "I can." Out of that promise comes _Requiem_, the cycle she could not write down because possessing it on paper would have meant her own arrest, and so she gave it line by line to a few trusted friends to carry in memory while the paper burned. It is the great poem of the Stalinist terror, told not from the cells but from the women left at the gate, and it will not keep the grief to itself: this is not one mother's anguish but a whole country's, queuing in the snow. Read it and you stand in that line too, learning what it costs to remember out loud when remembering is forbidden.