Thoughts on Peace: Halyna Kruk

resin

 

someday the war will end

and we’ll all revive at last

(oh how we’ll revive!)

we’ll heal like wounds, we’ll grow back

like leg and arm stumps, like an eye’s

empty socket, where it’s dark forever.

we’ll call the dead. еach name.

and they’ll all come. and how they’ll stare,

until the blood coagulates like resin…

but for now, hold on for your life

to the hawthorn roots (hawthorn cures the heart),

because only the heart holds all of this,

and the mind refuses to grasp…

---

sense of guilt

 

she who carried you off on her shoulder

the way the sea carries everything off that falls overboard

she who revived you one night

breathing for you, mouth-to-mouth

you don’t know what to call her for lack of female names

hard to find the courage to love her

she mended your karma, dancing like carmen —

moth on a record player, sign of the cross, girl

beneath her dark palate, behind her sharp tongue

is a poppy flower wound, she flew around too soon

he, who gives us a body (call him the butcher)

plays a fake fugue of happiness on your nerves

grasps at straws (he claims he’s rescuing you),

breaks you into hundreds of hopeless fragments

and while you sleep like the dead — he blames the war

for all those she couldn’t carry

out from under the shelling, the mines, the tanks

Halyna Kruk, poet, literary critic

*Translated by Amelia M. Glaser & Yuliya Ilchuk