Zoom Poetry Program
You don't have to be well-read in poetry or literature or spend lots of time reading poetry. Just log in for an hour on Zoom and join us as we read and discuss the poetry of famous poets. You will most likely enjoy the experience and wish you showed up sooner.
This week we will be doing the poetry of Serhiy Zhadan, a contemporary Ukrarinian poet who has been writing poetry about war since the beginning of the Ukrainian war about eight years ago.
Here is his poem, "The Mushrooms of Donbas", in the original Ukrainian with an English Translation.
THE MUSHROOMS OF DONBAS
In spring Donbas disappears in the fog, and the sun hides behind heaps of earth.
So you need to know where you’re going,
you need to know the man who can make the arrangements.
This man was a worker in the former pumping station
worn down by alcohol.
When we met, he said, “We, the workers of the pumping station,
were always considered the elite of the proletariat, yeah, the elite.
When everything fell the f___ apart, many
just put their hands down. But not the workers
of the pumping station, not us.
We organized an independent mining union,
we took over three buildings of the former plant
and started to grow mushrooms there.”
“Mushrooms?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Yes. Mushrooms. We wanted to grow cactus with mescaline, but
cactus won’t grow here in Donbas.
You know what’s important when you grow mushrooms?
It’s important to get high, that’s right, friend – it’s important to get high.
We get high, believe me, even now we have to get high, maybe it’s because
we are the elite of the proletariat.
And so – we take over three buildings and start our mushrooms.
Well, there’s – the joy of work, elbow grease,
you know – the heady feeling of work and accomplishment.
And what’s more important – everyone gets high! Everyone’s high even without mushrooms!
The problems began a few months later. This is gangland
territory, you know, recently a gas station was burnt down,
they were so eager to burn it down, they didn’t even manage to
fill up, so of course the police caught them.
And so, one gang decides to take us on, decides to take away
our mushrooms, can you believe it? I think in our place anyone else
would have bent over, that’s the way it is – everyone bends over here,
according to the social hierarchy.
But we get together and think – well, mushrooms – this is a good thing,
it’s not a matter of mushrooms, or elbow grease,
or even the pumping station, although this was one of the arguments.
We just thought – they are coming up, they will grow
our mushrooms will grow, you could say they’ll ripen to harvest
and what are we going to tell our children, how are we going to look them in the eye?
There are just things you have to answer for, things
you can’t just let go.
You are responsible for your penicillin,
and I am responsible for mine.
In a word, we just fought for our mushroom plantations. There we
beat them. And when they fell on the warm hearts of the mushrooms
we thought:
Everything that you make with your hands, works for you.
Everything that reaches your conscience beats
in rhythm with your heart.
We stayed on this land, so that it wouldn’t be far
for our children to visit our graves.
This is our island of freedom
our expanded
village consciousness.
Penicillin and Kalashnikovs – two symbols of struggle,
the Castro of Donbas leads the partisans
through the fog-covered mushroom plantations
to the Azov Sea.
“You know,” he told me, “at night, when everyone falls asleep
and the dark land sucks up the fog,
I feel how the earth moves around the sun, even in my dreams
I listen, listen to how they grow –
the mushrooms of Donbas, silent chimeras of the night,
emerging out of the emptiness, growing out of hard coal,
till hearts stand still, like elevators in buildings at night,
the mushrooms of Donbas grow and grow, never letting the discouraged
and condemned die of grief,
because, man, as long as we’re together,
there’s someone to dig up this earth,
and find in its warm innards
the black stuff of death
the black stuff of life.
“A bridge used to be there, someone recalled”
BY SERHIY ZHADAN
TRANSLATED BY JOHN HENNESSY AND OSTAP KIN
A bridge used to be there, someone recalled,
before the war:
an old pedestrian bridge.
The patrol passes every five hours.
Evening will be dry and pleasant.
Two older guys, and a young one.
He read twilight like a book,
rejoice, he repeated to himself, be joyful:
you’ll still sleep
in your bed today.
Today you’ll still wake up in a room
listening carefully to your body.
Today you’ll still be looking at the steel mill
standing idle all summer.
Home that is always with you like a sin.
Parents that will never grow older.
Today you’ll still see one of your people,
whomever you call your people.
He recalled the city he’d escaped from,
the scorched terrain he searched by hand.
He recalled a weeping man
saved by the squad.
Life will be quiet, not terrifying.
He should have returned a while ago.
What could happen to him, exactly?
What could happen?
The patrol will let him through,
and god will forgive.
God’s got other things to do.
They all were killed at once—both older guys,
and the young one.
Silence between the riverbanks.
You won’t explain anything to anyone.
The bomb landed right between them—
on that riverbank
closer to home.
The moon appeared between clouds,
listened to the melody of insects.
A quiet, sleepy medic
loaded the bodies into a military truck.
He quarreled with his stick shift.
Sought the leftover poison in a first-aid kit.
And an English-speaking observer
expertly looked at the corpses.
Even tan.
Nervous mouth.
He closed the eyes of the young one.
He thought to himself: a strange people,
the locals.
Translated from the Ukrainian
Source: Poetry (September 2019)
“They buried their son last winter”
BY SERHIY ZHADAN
TRANSLATED BY JOHN HENNESSY AND OSTAP KIN
They buried their son last winter.
Strange weather for winter—rain, thunder.
They buried him quietly—everybody’s busy.
Who did he fight for? I asked. We don’t know, they say.
He fought for someone, they say, but who—who knows?
Will it change anything, they say, what’s the point now?
I would have asked him myself, but now—there’s no need.
And he wouldn’t reply—he was buried without his head.
It’s the third year of war; they’re repairing the bridges.
I know so many things about you, but who’d listen?
I know, for example, the song you used to sing.
I know your sister. I always had a thing for her.
I know what you were afraid of, and why, even.
Who you met that winter, what you told him.
The sky gleams, full of ashes, every night now.
You always played for a neighboring school.
But who did you fight for?
To come here every year, to weed dry grass.
To dig the earth every year—heavy, lifeless.
To see the calm after tragedy every year.
To insist you didn’t shoot at us, at your people.
The birds disappear behind waves of rain.
To ask forgiveness for your sins.
But what do I know about your sins?
To beg the rain to finally stop.
It’s easier for birds, who know nothing of salvation, the soul.
Translated from the Ukrainian
Source: Poetry (September 2019)
See the poetry here : https://lithub.com/youve-got-to-live-somewhere-you-arent-afraid-to-die-contemporary-ukrainian-poetry-from-kharkiv/
This is is part two in a series on contemporary Ukrainian poetry; read part one, here.)
–Amelia Glaser, Cambridge, MA
*
Everything will change. Even this perpetual warmth
will change. The fog’s settled steadiness will shift.
The wet orthography of the grass will lose its inherently
clean line along with its stem’s expressive calligraphy.
The measure of things, which you accept so easily, will change,
the voice, which grew thicker in the dark, will get hoarse,
October, which you know by its broken light
and oversaturated space, will change too.
It will go like this: a bird’s lightness and rage
people, who forestall the evening chill by singing,
will start to remember winter like a forgotten language,
they’ll read it, re-read it, recognize it.
And everything will change for you, too, you
won’t escape this warning, this fear
of the blackbird in the morning circling the sharp,
warm trees, beating its wings against the blind gleam.
Lands that freeze to the core.
Sunny days for the brave and the luckless.
Your breath will change, in the end, when you recite
a memorized list of apologies, dogmas, and faults.
Dryness will change, and the wetness from the lowlands
will change, the field’s winter cold will change,
the stubborn October grasses and women’s inflections
will change. Like in fall, like in fall.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk
*
…let him speak now, or forever hold
his silence, let him explain obvious things—
how flames descend on lovers’ shoulders,
how despair, like a butcher, is scooping the world’s entrails
onto the morning cobblestones of a September city,
let him speak now, while it’s still possible
to at least save somebody, to at least help somebody,
Let him tell us how another descent into
the deep current will end, how immersion in the deep brown mixture of hash,
in the depths of darkness, when water, like silence,
lasts longer than any language, is more meaningful
than words uttered passionately, stronger than the declarations
between two people struck by the dance of love.
Let him warn this lighthearted pair, who are carried,
like a fish by the rhythm of groundwater,
by the change in wind, by the early October sun, let him warn them,
that everyone will be cast ashore, everyone torn from within
by the cold of shattered glass,
no one will manage to stop the flow,
no one will read the heavenly book,
written in the dead language of autumn.
Rather let him speak now, while they, enchanted,
count birds like the letters of a name scrawled by a child’s
hand, let him speak, let him try to break
this joy of grown-ups,
who stand facing one another,
as if to guard their loneliness.
The birds’ agile dance,
the logic of warm gestures,
bodies, like letters forming
joyful sentences.
Anyway, everything was clear from the start. And whom did it stop?
Whom did it scare?
The eternal sound of a river.
Eternal warnings and eternal courage.
They are so strong as they migrate South.
So touching when they return home.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk
*
Don’t say it aloud,
don’t let the coastal span of another utterance
roll off your tongue.
It’s a subtle, innate, human skill
of non-articulation, omission, awkwardness,
concealing something light behind your heart,
something so light, so sweet, so unshareable,
this wild generosity of not burdening anyone
with things that might make their face twitch.
And then speech starts, like the start of a cold,
it warms your lungs, and the fever sets in,
and since early August anxious people have been wandering around
glowing from within with this mysterious light.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk
*
A brief history of snow,
as told by eyewitnesses
mimicked by a chorus
collected from passers-by:
give me a chronology of the snowfall,
let me hold the thread that leads
to the borders of winter,
to a blizzard’s blue outskirts.
A brief description of what fills
the space between eastern dunes
and western lowlands,
a brief stop in winter’s long expedition.
All those who defended this city
will come out to its walls
and call after the bad weather
that fell on the shoulders of their dead:
You go first, snow, go,
once you’ve stepped forward, we’ll follow,
as you go out to the field
our singing will follow you.
After all, we’re the ones singing on a quiet night
when it’s silent downtown,
we plant the seeds of a sigh
in the black soil of breath.
Snow, fall on our childhood—
the safe haven of loyalty and noise,
here we were friendly
with the dark side of language,
with the deepening tenderness,
here we learned to collect voices
like coins,
you go first, snow, go first,
fill up the deep sadness of the well
that opened for you,
like a metaphor.
Past the last gasps of childhood behind the station wall
and the amateur blueprint of a Sunday school,
past the houses on a hill, where boys’
fragile voices break at the stem,
go ahead of us, snow, mark us present
in the book of comings and goings,
in the nighttime registry of love,
you go first, don’t be afraid of getting lost in the field
because we know you won’t get beyond the boundaries of sound,
beyond the boundaries of our names,
the world is like a dictionary, it preserves its own depths,
shares it with school teachers
and their students.
Your night is like prison bread, hidden in a pocket,
like the oblique silhouette of someone walking, the wax that’s shaped into the moon,
your path is a reinvented chronicle of cities,
the slope leading to the square,
the deep tracks left by hunters,
where fear meets courage.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk.
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/online-resources/gale-academic-onefile
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/online-resources/gale-literature-litfinder
Online Resources
Gale Academic OneFile
Peer-reviewed articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources.