​Poems by Iya Kiva 

​[refugees. theater]
 
the first night in the safe place – this is what we call the west of the country –
you are lying on the theater floor like props
for the war you can watch for free
in all the eyes at once of the animals frightened to death
 
[you still have time to buy a ticket in the first row of the third world war –
wrote a well-known western journalist on the eve of the Flood]
 
the stage-light falls well
so the world can notice dirt under your nails
and your too-long hair, not cut since poland,
that crackles with jewish family branches
when the chalk of good puts a cross on it
 
you have no manicure – have not done it for eight years –
so when you are reading “this one is for the woman from Bucha”
(will they teach at school about this photo?)
in someone’s cherry orchard on the well-groomed fingers
you ask the red color if it is ashamed of this comparison
 
but we, like the daffodils sold by old women on tram stops,
from now on will never feel shame of being or not being
the bitter bulbs of the trees that grow by the roadsides of history
 
well, in a couple of days you will walk down the avenue
of freedom (not a metaphor)
to drop all your prophetic dreams on the floor of the barbershop –
but this will not save you: for memory, like a madman
with a razor of longing in his hand,
is leading you along a dusty field full of dead potatoes
and so long is this field that you see dirt instead of eyes in children’s faces
 
but for now you are lying on the theater floor like props
and shuddering at the jingling of the trams –
these civil singers in the choir of military aviation –
and you cannot take wax out of the ears of the modern music lovers
 
Translated  from Ukrainian by Eugenia Kanishcheva

​Iya Kiva is a poet, translator and journalist. She was born in 1984 in Donetsk and because of the Russian-Ukrainian war she has lived in Kyiv since the summer of 2014. From March 2022 she lives in Lviv. Kiva writes in both Russian and Ukrainian. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Podal’she ot raya [Farther from Heaven] (2018) and Persha storinka zimi [The First Page of Winter] (2019), as well as a book of interviews with Belarusian writers. Kiva is a member of the PEN Club Ukraine. Her poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages. 

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