In this extraordinary moment when we are gathering ourselves up from the years of a pandemic, a war is now ravaging Ukraine and, like all wars, the world beyond. April is poetry month. What can a poet say? As poets, we are also listeners to other voices. Right now, is the time to listen as well as write. I invite all of us to turn our attention to the poetic voices of Ukraine and Russia who know the deep roots of imperial travesty. They have everything to say and have been saying it for centuries. Take time to find one or two of these voices and read what they are telling us. Honor them by taking in their words. This article on Literary Hub focuses on the work of Ukranian poet, Halyna Kruk, a voice that speaks about and against the aggressions toward Ukraine. Her voice is a perfect place to start.
The Russian poet, Polina Barskova quotes W.H. Auden: poetry makes nothing happen, and then she continues, saying, “we’ve been wondering ever since — are we so impotent, so powerless? Poetry cannot shoot, cannot heal, cannot abolish death. Poetry’s jobs are minor: to comfort a mourner, a lover, for a brief moment. Elegy, one of the earliest forms of poetry, was born as funeral song. As I see it now, the job of consolation is crucial, the job of giving medicine — even if it cannot bring anybody back to life, it can patch the texture of life as it is, make it softer, warmer. Damn it, make it prettier.”
Ukrainian Poets: Serhiy Zhadan, Halyna Kruk, Illy Kaminsky, Oksana Zabuzhko, Ilya Kiva, Kateryna Kalytko, Vasyl Holoborodko, Yurii Andrukhovy, Iryna Shuvalova, Natalka Bilotserkivets, Ihor Pavlyuk, Moysey Fishbein, Liudmyla Skyrda, Hanna Yablonska, Iryna Senyk, Lyubov Sirota, Myroslav Laiuk, Anastasia Afanasieva, Anna Bagriana,
Russian Poets: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Bella Akhmadulina, Vera Polozkova, Elena Fanilova, Maria Stepanova
No war by Halyna Kruk
my love language has broken teeth
spit, you say, spit ‘em all out, spit ‘em quick!
you’ll get straighter ones.
with a better bite.
my love language is a wreck,
avoid this thicket, it’s mine upon mine, a tangle of tripwires,
you never know what a word really means,
which memory you can touch, which will detonate.
we planted this hedge so no one would get hit,
hung caution signs to warn the others
of death disguised as a pretty view
but you just offer to remove them so nothing
ruins the picture, not waiting for the sappers,
not clearing the empty terrain of thorns.
my love language is heavy as a father’s gaze,
immovable as the eyelids upon his son’s coffin,
which they used all week to steady their guns,
my love language is choking on its words like his mother
I held it close when I was crying and to stop crying,
I held it close. I knotted it like a camouflage net,
color coordinated with the season, so it could
hide someone.
you say don’t get mad. be wiser. take the high road.
tame your love language. push it out. purge yourself of it.
plant a flower in this scorched land.
in this empty place in the language and in you
you must have saved a few flower seeds.
you must have saved a kind word someplace.
someplace in your soul, that will forgive everything
my love language has grown so big
that my tongue comes out with it,
and my soul come out
with this soulless language.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
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