September 19, 2026

Stay Where Your People Are

No, not under the vault of alien skies, and not under the shelter of alien wings— I was with my people then, there, where my people, unfortunately, were.

Akhmatova wrote these lines as the epigraph to Requiem, the cycle documenting Stalin's terror and her own seventeen months standing in prison lines outside Leningrad, waiting for word of her arrested son. Unlike many writers and intellectuals of her generation, she refused offers to leave Russia for safety abroad, choosing instead to remain among the women who stood beside her in those lines, all waiting on the same news. The poem insists that belonging is not where comfort is easiest but where the people you claim as your own are actually suffering. It speaks to community today because it treats solidarity as a decision made with your feet, not just a feeling in your chest.