Today is Anna's name day.

The name came from Hebrew, Channah, grace.

The first Hannah in the Book prayed without sound, her lips moving, no voice, and the priest took her for drunk. That is what real prayer looks like: quiet, mistaken for something else. Then the name walked through the literatures of the world and in each one it carried something different. Russia gave it Anna Karenina, who stepped under the train of other people’s expectations. England - Anne Elliot of Persuasion, who waited eight years and received a letter that begins in half agony, half hope. Germany sent Anna Blume from the Schwitters poem, beloved of twenty-seven senses, and the poet discovered the essential thing about her: read from the back she stays the same, A-N-N-A, a name that cannot be reversed. America began with an Anna: the first published poet of that continent was Anne Bradstreet, year 1650, a woman. Poland gave Anna Swirszczynska, who carried the wounded through the Uprising and thirty years later built a barricade of poems from it. Holland - the girl with the diary, Anne Frank, who wrote while the world beh

ind the wall stopped being a world. Canada - red-haired Anne of Green Gables, unwanted, and yet she was the one who taught a house to love. And Akhmatova, who stood at the prison wall with a parcel for her son and wrote it down quietly, like that first Hannah. In the Poland of my parents a name day mattered more than a birthday. A birthday you have for yourself, a name day for people. My Mother’s name was Anna. Every year on the twenty-sixth of July the house smelled of cake from the morning, the table was too small, the chairs borrowed from neighbours. She stood in the middle of it all, in her apron, the most important person of the summer. I know no bad Annas. Maybe they exist, but they have passed me by. The ones I know and knew carry the same warmth, as if the name were a contract signed before birth. To all Annas, wherever you are today: my warmest wishes. May someone borrow chairs for you today.

P.S. It was She who taught me to read…

Dominic