And as the world vomits up war

 *

1.

And as the world vomits up war
And retreats into emptiness,
Spring’s begun dividing

her storks and cranes among us
There’s a power in this northern migration,

Edging out fear and assent,
While out on the spring ice
A primordial evil lands in your hands

The future tense and past tense
Got stuck in the muck of grammar
The storks fell asleep in their nests
Not yet having arrived

Only the Ukrainian Army and its volunteers
are awake. In this countdown to a new era—
a baby born in a basement
will receive the holy tablets

 

2.

If only I could, like a nighttime moth,
whisper to this moment, “stop”
and reach the light, crawl behind the backdrop,
as though it had never been winter.
The moth would fly off to the muse Urania,
to a branch of Iwaszkiewicz’s pine.
The vintner is pouring the birds his wine,
growing painlessly drunk, himself.
Lullaby of winter, rock me, leave me
in a warm fur coat to write poetry,
and drive the hares from the apple trees,
so they won’t eat the shoots in their dreams,
look around at the grain, at your loved ones, at us,
let it be Christmastime again.
And after that, spring, and let us be alive,
and the moth is still resting inside my sleeve…

 

3.

Yesterday, I put on my father’s pants.
They fit me now.
I remember him well in them
around the age I am now.
Tanned. Elusive.
Or was I running slowly around him?
Tо the place where his pants were the color of coffee with milk,
and not vomit with vodka.
I always ran with a much older crowd.
Searching, I guess, for the fisherman, the amateur photographer,
the grower of tomatoes under a heat-lamp
for my Christmas-birthday,
the electrical engineer, far away
in my childhood forests,
that one, who at fourteen,
saw his first lightbulb.

 

4.

The forest is almost ours,
like the salt in the salt-shaker.
It’s calm and has no fear,
for from its mouth and eyelashes bird to bird
and ravine to ravine
nod as if to friends:
and you are glad.
Ulysses, forest, come back to us,
for my father has merged with you
and has become like you—
squirrely, snowy and avian,
if only I could send my son
your letters.

 

5.

Snow is falling on Krakow the kind
that slows your phrases and slows your actions
that slows the tears dripping from your lashes
out of wartime fear for Kyiv

Krakow’s a raincoat, a junior size,
where you’ll find yourself hidden deep in a pocket
Unharmed, and in the other side’s
despair and a pain that won’t subside.

You are Szymborska’s cigarette lighter
inside that pocket, the one on the right.
But a sea of trouble spilled out in the left,
as big as the floodplain in Irpin.

Translated, from the Ukrainian, by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.

____________________________________

Natalia Belchenko is a poet and translator. Born in Kyiv, she is a recipient of the Hubert Burda Prize (Germany, 2000) and the National Writer’s Union of Ukraine Mykola Ushakov Prize in Literature (Ukraine, 2006). Finalist of the Gennady Grigoriev Prize (Russia, 2013), the L. Vysheslavsky’s “Poet’s Planet” prize-winner (Ukraine, 2014). Her works include eight collections of poetry and numerous magazine selections and anthology publications, both in Ukraine and abroad (in English, German, French, Polish, Korean, Dutch, Bulgarian, etc.).