Poems by Yuliya Musakovska
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WORDS
Who said that words have no value now? Our words that are being written in the air with the incandescent iron of breath, that strike like clotted blood on pale lips, are cutting into the soil under our feet, settling on our clothes and shoes like dust from ruined homes. Our words are stretching to those dear to us – to everyone who is scattered around the country’s map with bullet holes in it, along the strong connecting wires attached to the heart, along the tight ropes of lasting together. How much we can love as one. How much we can hate. The words we put into a backpack just before leaving. The words we grab to maintain who-knows-what kind of balance, when the ground is kicked out from under our feet, like an unsteady stool. The words we press to a gaping wound, the torn tender belly of the teenage girl, safety. Our words, hard and swollen with rage, black from grief, like the concrete covering of an old bomb shelter. There is nothing more durable, nothing less fleeting. 21.03.2022 Translated by Ella Yevtushenko and Olena Jennings First published in Inkroci Magazine (Italy) SAFE PLACE Are you in a safe place? -- This sounds like a prayer, repeated over and over since February 24, 2022 to loved ones and friends. I‘m asking myself: am I in a safe place? Could I be? Could I be in a safe place when my parents refuse to leave their home but have no air-raid shelter beneath their apartment block? The cellar that serves as one looks like it may turn into a mass burial too quickly. Could I be in a safe place when my father, in cancer remission, is not able to walk quickly to a school in the neighborhood that has a proper air-raid shelter after all. For those who can run, it takes about seven minutes to get there. What are his chances? Could I be in a safe place when my nearly blind grandfather can hardly descend a staircase even if guided carefully, with no rush. He, who fought Nazis in World War II, is not afraid of today’s russian fascists. He will outlive them all, he says. Them, soon to lay in the fertile Ukrainian soil. They haven’t bombed your city yet, some say. You are in a safe place, stop whining. Just air raid sirens several times a day and probably at night. Sometimes none at all, it is safe. Could I be in a safe place when my friends are under constant shelling in Kharkiv, Sumy, Irpin, Bucha, unable to leave? When my friend’s parents in Chernihiv are out of reach for several days? No more electricity, gas, or roads, they say. Could I be in a safe place when 1300 have been killed in besieged Mariupol? Today, in the city of Zaporizhya the beasts calling themselves russian soldiers crashed a civilian car with their tank. A little boy burned to death. Are you in a safe place?.. 12.03.2022 First published in Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), April 2022 METAPHORS such awkward, terrible poems soaked with rage, controvertible no beauty in them, no aesthetics; metaphors withered and scattered deprived of blooming metaphors buried on playgrounds under hastily made crosses frozen in unnatural poses across the thresholds, strewn with dust cooking food over an open fire in attempt to survive metaphors dying of dehydration under the rubble shot in a car under a makeshift white flag lying on the footpath with motley backpacks on their backs next to their executed pets forgive me, but such poems are all we have for you today, ladies and gentlemen, dear estimable spectators in the theatre of war 31.03.2022 Translated by Anatoly Kudryavitsky First published in the anthology "Invasion: Ukrainian Poems about the War", Dublin, Ireland, 2022 |
Yuliya Musakovska is an award-winning poet, translator, and member of PEN Ukraine. She is the author of five poetry collections in Ukrainian, most recently The God of Freedom (2021). Her poems have been translated into several languages, including English, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Chinese, and Hebrew. Yuliya is a translator of Tomas Tranströmer into Ukrainian and of contemporary Ukrainian poetry into English. She has received numerous literary awards, including Krok Publishing House’s DICTUM Prize, the Smoloskyp Poetry Award, and the Ostroh Academy Vytoky Award. She lives in the city where she was born, Lviv, Ukraine.
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