from “The People of Donbas”
each of these ruins had an address
here lay the white bow of a holiday photo
something was there too. maybe. my life
dragged the rags of emptiness from neighborhood to neighborhood
the houses hung in the air like stripped wallpaper
as we sipped from a sieve the last drops of what happened
dust occupied the space without a fight
we gathered it from dreams like the petals of dead flowers
and fire knocked memory’s motley carpet from our hands
language shed its feathers like a wounded dove
and naked now i can’t be with people
all that’s left is to sketch beasts on the margins of silence
and play myself every day like a record
oh what a beautiful morning the occupation’s bright sunday
Translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
Amelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at UC San Diego. She is the author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands and Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, and the editor of Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising and, with Steven Lee, Comintern Aesthetics. She translates from Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish.
Yuliya Ilchuk is Associate Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture at Stanford. She is the author of Nikolai Gogol’s Hybrid Performance and The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine, as well as several poetry translations. She edited and translated the anthology Ukrainian Literary Modernism: A Critical Reader.