take all your belongings
everything that’s yours
split lips cut knees
the cracked jar of a head from which
memory slowly seeps and all you can
leave just leave behind
One year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, poet Iryna Shuvalova proposes an aesthetics of escape.
Read the poem, translated from the Ukrainian by Uilleam Blacker
This poem was written to memorialize a suicidal charge by light cavalry over open terrain by British forces in the Battle of Balaclava (Ukraine) in the Crimean War (1854-56). 247 men of the 637 in the charge were killed or wounded. The date of the Battle was October 25, 1854 and Tennyson wrote this famous poem in the same year.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
`Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
`Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel’d from the sabre-stroke
Shatter’d and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!
🖖Honorable Rep. Gibbs, Bob
My name is Timothy mark Morrison, and I am a community member who resides and works in your district.
I support Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion. I want to ask you to do everything in your power to help Ukraine win the war that mass-murderer Putin has started. Ukraine needs heavy weapons, heavy artillery, heavy armor, air defense systems, and attack aircraft!
, entrepreneurs and military experts: https://saveualist.com/.
Ukrainians have demonstrated incredible resolve and will to fight evil that is the Russian army. I believe that the United States must play a decisive role in stopping the atrocities committed in Ukraine.
Despite the actions taken so far by the Biden Administration to help the Ukrainian military (which I am grateful for), I strongly believe that we are NOT doing enough! President Zelenskyy has stated that more than 20 000 civilians have been killed in Mariupol - why did we let that happen? Why does it take so long to send a sizable military aid to the Ukrainian forces so that they could finally put a stop to this bloodshed?
Kids were raped in Bucha, for goodness sake - what else must Putin do so that we would say “Enough!”. I urge you to act. Putin is absolute evil and he must be stopped NOW!
Empowering Ukrainians to defend their homeland is morally and pragmatically the right thing to do.
I ask you to sign a letter that your colleagues in Congress have already sent to the President of the United States of America, Joe Biden, urging him to increase military aid to Ukraine ( https://crow.house.gov/media/press-releases/reps-crow-kim-meijer-make-bipartisan-push-more-military-aid-ukraine )
Please, #ArmUkraineNOW!
Sincerely, Timothy mark Morrison
*
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…
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.).
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