Who sleeps at night? No one is sleeping.
 In the cradle a child is screaming.
 An old man sits over his death, and anyone
 young enough talks to his love, breathes 
into her lips, looks into her eyes.

In 1941 Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga while most families of the Union of Soviet writers were evacuated to Chistopol. Tsvetaeva wanted to name him Boris (after Pasternak); Efron insisted on Georgy. Yesterday.

Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it.