With a passion and fierceness that radiates through any language, Marina Tsvetaeva's poems are beautiful and vulnerable windows into her soul. She spoke of love and loss with a deep yearning that is cloaked in powerful metaphors, and vivid imagery as if she is sharing an intimate secret with a close friend but its intensity reverberates as loudly as if she is shouting it from the rooftops. A deep feeling of pain permeates through much of her poetry. Many of Tsvetaeva's works are saturated with tears of anguish and fear for youth cut much too short. As a mother who lost one child to the famine, her poems are wracked with her grief for the loss of her daughter's life. "Having seen so little, of the child's head/ Only of joy knew/ The heart of the kid." Moreover, it is the inevitability of aging that torments her, knowing that it cannot be stopped or even slowed and that each step forward is a step closer to loss. She refers to gray hairs as "ashes of treasures:/Of hurt and loss." They are reminders of abandonment and neglect, a signifier that "God knocks at the door -/ Once the house has burned down!" In a way it is not just the los of her children's youth and innocence that she dreads but the loss of her own as well. Queer women were not legally persecuted as gay men were but that did not mean that they were safe from judgement. Tsvetaeva's work reflect her fear of being judged but her determination to stand in her authenticity. "Wings are freedom only when they are wide open in flight. On one's back they are a heavy weight." Her words were her wings and her poems allowed her to take flight. She feared mortality, being forgotten, and not being loved, just like anybody else. In this way her work helped to destigmatize the LGBTQIA+ community. It is no wonder she is regarded as one of the greatest authors of twentieth century Russia.