In the spring March stillness.
I know not of your heavy thoughts
Nor of the camp days before your death.
Full of life, joyful, happy
You remain in my memory.
The poet was written in 1941 when Vera was informed that A.N.P., who had been arrested for providing forged passports to Jews, had perished in Dachau.
Another fifteen years passes before Vera Lourie once again begins to write. Her experiences in Germany before and after the war were of interest to the Russian emigre community and in addition she records for Russkaja Mysl’ her memoirs of Gumilev, Evreinov and Andrej Belyj. She also decides to publish several of her earlier poems again, and she composes three new ones which recall the earlier days in Petersburg and also capture the reality of Berlin.
Once again silent for almost two decades Vera turns to poetry again in 1983. She writes four poems in Russian, all dedicated to R.H. No longer about Petersburg, the new poems detail the long and difficult journey of her life, now made somewhat easier by her new found friend. There is renewed joy, a sense of the seasons, of summer coming after the winter. The days without her friend are empty and gray, and the poet asks forgiveness for perhaps loving her too tenderly. Her final poem written in Russian is both a summation of her own literary career and a recognition and tribute to Russian Berlin, which has been her home for the past sixty years. “You won’t recognize die old streets of Berlin,” but Vera remembers them and her own modest literary efforts of the 1920’s:
This tone has long since passed…
A new city has risen from the ruins,
Only I have not grown weary
Of recalling you, old Berlin!
Something of a new life occurs in 1983 for Vera Lourie. She is inspired to write in German and to date has written over thirty poems which she calls Tagebuch einer Seele. Responding to the presence and artistic sensitivity of her special friend, Vera first attemts to shower her with love and affection. One is struck by the intensity of the emotion and the singular focus of the poet’s vision. Yet for readers of the Russian poems, the themes begin to echo her earlier works and follow a similar progression. There is the love, so all-consuming that it cannot be matched. The ensuing disapointment and the realization of human limitations lead the poet to the sanctuary of memory and imagination — to her Muse and poetry. There is her Marchenland in the world of music and poetry “Ich war nicht mehr alt, ich war nicht mehr krank.” In her poem “Es war, es ist” Vera’s