OSTAP SLYVYNSKY ~

 

Amber

Tell me, was it a joke? I have been digging

all night long, just like you told me to;

mice were laughing at me.

I seemed to see, on the other side,

the sun warming the leaves,

children being readied for school,

their white collars straightened,

people checking if the iron was left on,

watering petunias from a tin

watering can.

I could swear I heard

a heart beating through the clay. But was I

teasing this hope for nothing?

For nothing, I shuffled the earth, looking for even

a single bright thread in it?

Explain this to me, while I'm standing

staring at my own open palm.

There—right under my ring finger—

where the handle of a shovel rubbed my skin,

a grain of amber is now growing,

like a lamp, lit for a short while

in some purgatory of my own

with my very own hand.

__________________

Ostap Slyvynsky

Winter King

translated by Vitaly Chernetsky & Iryna Shuvalova

Lost Horse Press, 2023

YURI ANDRUKHOVYCH ~

 

from Photo Studies

AUGUST STUDY

august the heat of a scorching pot

roofs and portals yellow flashing

a book carelessly flipped through

suddenly dazzlingly blooming like heat

august is a river unspeakably mellow

the old secession buildings flow

a clean thin membrane of light

covers the noon processions of trees

august my relentless idyll

the oily state of warm wax

a street violin sonata sunday

sharp as a sting

                           anxious

                                           dense

____________________

YURI ANDRUKHOVYCH

Set Change

translated John Hennessy & Ostap Kin

New York Review of Books, 2024

SERHIY ZHADAN ~

 

From CATALOGUE OF SHIPS (2020)

This is how you stand for a family photo,

look into the eyes of the photographer

the way you'd look into the eyes of a bird

perching outside your window:

remember me, wrathful bird's eye,

when we meet next time,

on the other side of this piercing — like a scream — life,

on the other side of anxious—like a stream— solitude.

Remember my hands,

still without poisonous ink under the fingernails,

remember my voice

which still doesn't have the nails of a man's rage,

remember the gratitude of children

who take sweets on Easter day from the gravestones

of their parents.

In forty years I won't talk in my dreams

with dead characters from novels I've read.

There won't be this magnetic moon

above the open fracture of the road.

In forty years no one will hold me

when I jump into May lakes.

Projection booths will be locked,

the tombs of school library stacks looted.

Remember me, history, looking like a bird

forced into the fog of borderlands every year.

Reflections of bright faces on my palms.

Women and men from the 70s like dead planets

illuminate the summer air.

In their dreams children talk with dead captains.

Children emerge from darkness guided by the photographer's voice.

They run across childhood

like lizards running across a road in July.

They stand in the backyard,

staring suspiciously  into the eyes of history.

Sing, dead poets

who've ended up in schoolbooks

like starlings in cages.

In songs they celebrate the motherland

of a sky scorched throughout the summer.

The surgical suture of a poem cleanly re-written darkness.

The black flower of rain slowly grows between rivers.

__________________________

Serhiy Zhadan

A New Orthography

poems translated from the Ukrainian

by John Hennessy & Ostap Kin

Lost Horse Press, 2020