Poems by Lesyk Panasiuk
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BACK HOME Once upon a morning I woke up being a bomb And flew headlong home Translated from Ukrainian by Victoria Feshchuk PROMETHEUS Yesterday I saw a photo of a dead Russian soldier with two looted vibrators in his hands he held them like two relay batons – no, more like two Olympic torches instead of a flame, there flickered a pleasure he could not even carry to the border it would not blaze full-force in some Vorkuta or Murmansk his compatriots would not feel it would never see his feat But then, there have always been plenty of Russian Prometheuses It’s just, they used to steal Ukrainian history, Ukrainian art, and so on down the list you know it yourself now they’ve gotten to Ukrainian pleasure Did the little soldier feel the grandeur of his heroism was he hoping they’d erect a monument in his honor name candies after him, or yet another Russian missile system? Two vibrators things worth fighting for things worth dying for that’s what he must have been thinking Translated from Ukrainian by Alex Averbuch |
Lesyk Panasiuk is a Ukrainian writer, translator, designer and performance artist. He is the author of three poetry books (in Ukrainian), books in translation published in Romanian and Russian, individual works translated into 20 languages. He has been a translator and co-translator of books by Valzhyna Mort, Siarhey Prylutski, Dmitry Kuzmin, Artem Werle and 3 anthologies of Belarusian literature. He is a scholar of the President of Ukraine stipend for writers (2019) and a resident and scholar of international residences for writers and translators in Latvia (Ventspils, 2019) and Poland (Warsaw, 2021).
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