The Last Toast

I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together;

and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead-cold pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities;

that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God, in fact, has not saved us.

Anna Akhmatova
Photo by Devon Janse van Rensburg on Unsplash