And the ships sail slowly down the Neva.

From Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova, translated by D. M. Thomas.  The last lines of Requiem.  

She is referencing the time during the Great Purge when she stood in line trying to discover the fate of her husband and son, imprisoned by Stalin.  

She prefaces the poem with:

No, not under foreign heavenly-cope, and 

Not canopied by foreign wings-

I was with my people in those hours,

There where, unhappily) my people were.

In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seven­teen months in prison queues in Leningrad.  One day somebody identified' me.  Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips.  She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): 'Can you describe this ?' And I said: 'Yes, I can.'  And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.

1 April 1957, Leningrad

The poem concludes.

From Requiem

by Anna Akhmatova 

Again the hands of the clock are nearing 

The unforgettable hour. I see, hear, touch

All of you : the cripple they had to support 

Painfully to the end of the line ; the moribund;

And the girl who would shake her beautiful head and 

Say: 'I come here as if it were home.'

I should like to call you all by name, 

But they have lost the lists. . . .

I have woven for them a great shroud

Out of the poor words I overheard them speak .

I remember them always and everywhere, 

And if they shut my tormented mouth,

Through which a hundred million of my people cry, 

Let them remember me also. . . .

And if ever in this country they should want 

To build me a monument

I consent to that honour,

But only on condition that they

Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born: 

My last links there were broken long ago,

Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,

Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours 

And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

Lest in blessed death I should forget

The grinding scream of the Black Marias,

The hideous clanging gate, the old 

Woman wailing like a wounded beast.

And may the melting snow drop like tears 

From my motionless bronze eyelids,

And the prison pigeons coo above me 

And the ships sail slowly down the Neva.