The brutal war against Ukraine grinds relentlessly on and enters a new phase at the massive Russian offensive in the eastern Donbas region and missile attacks on Odessa in the Crimea and western cities that are both escape
routes for refugees and receiving points and staging areas for influxes of Western arms and ammunition. Ukraine resistance remains fierce
and billions of Dollars’ worth of heavy weapons including artillery and anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile systems, and drones as well parts for helicopters and jet fighters are pouring into the country from the U.S.
and NATO allies enraging a probably unstable
Vladimir Putin.
It is just the latest in battles for the breadbasket of Eastern Europe stretching back
centuries involving the Rus, the Mongol Hoards, Tartars, Cossacks, Poles, Imperial Russia, the Ottoman Turks, World War I Bulgarians and Austrians, Red and White Armies during the post-revolutionary
Russian Civil War, Stalinist
repression and famine, Nazi invasion with collaborationist genocidal
attacks on Jews, and finally post-Soviet attacks on Crimea and ethnic Russian rebellions in the east.
Ukrainians feel the weight of this history to their very bones, and it is reflected in new poetry arising from the war.
Halyna Kruk was born in Lviv, Ukraine and was educated at the University of Lviv, earning a PhD in Ukrainian literature in 2001. She is a professor of literary studies at the university where her research focused on medieval literature in the country. Her
first two collections of poetry were published in 1997: Mandry
u Poshukakh Domu (Journeys in Search
of Home) and Slidy na Pisku (Footprints on Sand). She also writes poetry and fiction for children. Kruk has been vice-president of the
Ukrainian branch of the writer’s organization
PEN. In 1996–97, she won the literary competitions Ptyvitannia Zhyttia and Granoslov. In 2003, she was awarded the Gaude
Polonia Fellowship by the Polish Ministry of
Culture. In the same year, she won the Step by Step international competition for children’s books. She has participated in the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators’ program. Her deep grounding in Ukrainian
culture and history have informed her new writing about the current war translated into English by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
we stopped digging deep long
ago,
just a couple fingers down,
we leave the plowed earth
unturned,
so the fertile soil won’t
all blow away in one generation
so we rake our beds,
make the sign of the cross,
and sow
we sow, from here to there,
like everyone
like everywhere
we stopped digging deep long
ago
in this uncertain field of
ours-yours
because all kinds of junk
can turn up:
human bones, horses’ heads,
unexploded mines,
a battle ax, the peg that
marked the border
between our side and yours
we don’t go there
between the eyes out of
sight about the eye
we don’t measure it in
steps,
we can’t tell
when all our land’s stuck to
our soles
and keeps us from moving our
feet
—Halyna
Kruk
Despite the very real and dangerous
sacrifices many Russians have made to oppose Putin’s
invasion, Kruk turned a bitter, cynical eye to simple, empty anti-war
protests that call for an end to shooting without safety and security for Ukrainians.
“No War”
You’re standing with a “No
War” sign as if to redeem
the irreversible: this war
can’t be stopped,
like bright arterial blood
from an open wound
it flows till it kills,
it enters our cities with
the armed men,
seeps into our courtyards
with the reconnaissance units,
like deadly mercury beads
that can’t be put back,
you can’t fix it, except to
find and neutralize it,
these civilian managers,
clerks, IT-guys and students,
life didn’t prepare them for
street fights, but the war did,
on the frontline, in a
painfully familiar landscape, in a hurry
at first they only recruit
experienced combat fighters to the defense units,
after that gamers who play
Dune and Fallout,
or maybe if you’ve had a
short-course in Molotov cocktails from a bartender you know,
at the local club while the
kids are asleep, the kids are crying, the kids are being born
into a world temporarily
unfit for life
Out on the playground
they’re assembling Czech hedgehogs,
and nuclear families are
mixing deadly “drinks.”
whole families, finally
enjoying a conversation
and a collective project—war
shortens the distance
from person to person, from
birth to death,
from what we never wished
for—
to what it turned out we
were capable of
“Mom, pick up the phone,” a
woman’s been pleading for two hours in the apartment building basement,
stubborn and dense, she
won’t stop believing in a miracle
but her mother is out of
cell phone range, in the suburbs,
where the prefab collapsed
like cheap Legos
from the massive strikes,
where just yesterday broadcast towers
stopped connecting people,
where the world got blown up into pre- and post-war
along the uneven fold of the
“no war” sign,
which you’ll toss in the
nearest trash,
on your way home from the
protest, Russian poet,
war kills with the hands of
the indifferent
and even the hands of idle
sympathizers.
—Halyna
Kruk
In the United Kingdom incumbent Poet Laureate Simon Armitage employed dramatic news footage as imagery in his Ukrainian protest.
Resistance
It’s war again: a family
carries its family
out of a pranged house
under a burning
thatch.
The next scene smacks
of archive
newsreel: platforms and trains
(never again,
never again),
toddlers passed
over heads and
shoulders, lifetimes stowed
in luggage
racks.
It’s war again: unmistakable smoke
on the near horizon
mistaken
for thick fog.
Fingers crossed.
An old blue tractor
tows an armoured
tank
into no-man’s
land.
It’s the ceasefire hour: godspeed the columns
of winter coats and
fur-lined hoods,
the high-wire
walk
over buckled bridges
managing cases and
bags,
balancing west
and east—godspeed.
It’s war again: the woman in black
gives sunflower
seeds to the soldier, insists
his marrow will
nourish
the national flower. In dreams
let bullets be
birds, let cluster bombs
burst into
flocks.
False news is news
with the pity
edited out. It’s
war again:
an air-raid siren can’t fully mute
the cathedral bells—
let’s call that
hope.
—Simon Armitage
Vasyl Makhno is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, essayist, and translator and author of 14 collections of poetry, most recently of which is One Sail House in 2021. He is the recipient of Kovaliv Fund Prize in 2008), Serbia’s International Povele Morave Prize in Poetry in 2013, the BBC Book of the Year Award in 2015, and the Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize for Encounter in 2020. He currently lives with his family in New York City. His poetry style, which eschews punctuation and other conventions has been described “anarchic.” Which begs the question—is he any relation to legendary communalist anarchist leader Nestor Makhno who commanded an independent anarchist army in Ukraine from 1917 to 1921 battling both Red and White armies to preserve the independence of peasant cooperatives and industrial unions. That Makhno died in exile in Paris in 1934 at the age of 45.
War
Lord, the
way Tychyna writes:
“And Bely, and Blok, and Yesenin”
the way they surrounded us
on all four sides
give us
strength and power
a hastily packed suitcase and bread
naturally their sly foxes lie
that we have neither shields nor centuries
Ihor leads
us somewhere
over the Don with his regiments
today with the February snow
and tomorrow with a bloody shield
and their
dark forces come from Tmutarakan
and Mokshas and Chud
shoot at our location
hit at the positions we take
so what is
there in The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign
and what is there in ancient sounds
you — jumping barefoot as a wolf
spreading the spit of the devil
reached the
rivers and borders
reached my clenched heart
your blackened icons
can’t even be cleansed with milk
Lord, the
way Tychyna writes
about Kyiv — the Messiah — about the country
why didn’t we learn these poems by heart?
Bleed — my heart — bleed
—Vasyl Makhno
Translated
from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings
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