: The Great Patriotic War. Leningrad is full of prison lines in which women spend months waiting for sentences for their innocently convicted sons, brothers, husbands.

The poem begins with the memory of Akhmatova - she is recognized in the prison Leningrad line, a woman standing next to her asks her to describe it, the poetess agrees.

The action takes place in wartime, terrible things happen - the arrests of innocent people. Near the prisons there are queues consisting of mothers and wives of prisoners. She spends seventeen months in prison lines waiting for a sentence for her son. All these women are waiting. Waiting for them is the worst test.

Akhmatova says that if someday a monument is erected to her, then it must be erected exactly where she spent seventeen terrible months:

And here, where I stood three hundred hours
And where the bolt was not opened for me.