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
