Poem of the Week

Winter in Trastevere

Valzhyna Mort

My love, let us read one more book about winter.

First strawberries redden a Roman market

the morning a mad empire bombs waking cities.

Magnolias bloom predictably. Snow is falling

in an essay that ends around a corner here,

where a man (b. Odesa) dies from torture

after a winter exile in Abruzzi.

Black shawls, black kitchens, red faces in Abruzzi,

hams hang from the ceilings in Abruzzi,

tortured to death after a winter in Abruzzi,

he who ate oranges in the snows of Abruzzi.

They boil snow in cauldrons in Mariupol,

and they boil snow in cauldrons in Mariupol.

They drink as long as it snows in Mariupol.

They drink and ask for drones in Mariupol.

I will read Natalia Ginzburg because it snows

in her short essay “Winter in the Abruzzi.”

Don’t you bring me strawberries, jolly friend.

The Yale Review · “Winter in Trastevere” by Valzhyna Mort

how did this poem begin for you?

On February 24, 2022, when Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I went to walk by Regina Coeli in Trastevere, Rome, and I thought of Leone Ginzburg, thirty-four, tortured to death behind this prison’s walls in 1944. Leone was born in Odesa, which was being bombed on that February day in 2022. Spring had arrived in Rome, but Ukraine seemed to be frozen in a perpetual winter. This poem arrived whole, surprising me with its balladlike cadence. Since childhood, I have loved hearing Belarusian village women sing such ballads, repeating the same line, with its blunt rhyme, mechanically, as if repetition were a cover for the mind to travel elsewhere.

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus, and moved to the United States in 2005. Her most recent poetry book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, won the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize.