Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

What was supposed to happen

 

What was supposed to happen was that between the incision in the sky
left by the sharp blades of grass,
cuts that bled out as summer
on the sandy shore in the evenings
you could read the fatigue
in our nightly rehearsals at the doorway,
you and I have lost our vigilance, our distrust,
which forced us to carry
our gospels of skepticism.

 

The train station, like a shoebox,
filled with letters from people who loved and believed,
is hidden in cubbyholes in cities strung across valleys
and along the banks of deep rivers,
now the station touches your shoulder with its smoky kiss,
this is where it releases you into the world,
like a bird catcher.
Let’s follow the noisy crowd, the passing procession
constantly moving,
creating a common frontier, illuminating the outline of eternity.

 

What was supposed to happen was that in the fall
nothing was supposed to change.
And you, who usually trust time to break
the structure of love, now hold the first snow in your hands,
a sign: that we’re still together,
our loyalty is to melodies and songs, the sounds of anxiety and joy
here they are always with us,
how? how could you have doubted the possibility
of light, its unbearable healing?

 

What was supposed to happen was exactly this. And the fact that you
didn’t notice, did not consider it worthy of trust and awe,
today drives you like wind drives sails,
rules you like the calendar rules
the tides –
now let’s follow the music of cooling,
the flow of the shadows, the moist earth of sadness.

 

What was supposed to happen, nobody asked us about it,
but even we had the right to expect and hope.
The evening looks like the scratched hand of a gardener:
so much pain and sacrifice, so much patience and doubt.
How can you bear the wild ups and downs of life,
all the mismatched loves, details, and efforts?

 

It was all supposed to happen like this. I said:
love still speaks through us as the only language we have,
the language of the mute, the language of those who despair, the language of adults,
the language of those who least believe in the possibility of finding understanding,
explaining something to an outsider, talking through all doubts and beliefs
with a stranger.

 

But you carefully answered
my every attempt
to talk as if the burden of mistrust did not exist in language,
as if we were still just children of dictionaries,
happy schoolchildren in love with writing,
who believe in the structure of speech,
in undisputed tenderness,
in the ease of singing.
It was you that caused letters to be reborn,
roots to intertwine and
syllabic vines to grow.

 

The air of winter seeps in quietly, quietly.
The stalks curl up in dark valleys for a long, long time.
Grow warm with my words, grow warm and be safe.
Now it is night. Time to be safe. Time to stand up.

 

November 21, 2022

 

Serhiy Zhadan is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated writers. In 2022 he received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the German Peace Prize, and nine international literature prizes. His books, available in English from Yale University Press, include: The Orphanage, Mesopotamia, What We Live for, What We Die For: Selected Poems and How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the PEN Poetry Translation Award. He was born in Luhansk, Ukraine’s easternmost region, and lives in Kharkiv. He has worked with Yara Arts Group since 2005, including the award-winning show 1917-2017: Tychyna, Zhadan & the Dogs. He is the front man for his band Zhadan & the Dogs.

Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps have been translating Serhiy Zhadan’s work since 2002 and have received several NYSCA grants and the NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for their work on Zhadan.

Tkacz heads Yara Arts Group and has directed forty original shows at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York.

Phipps is the author of nine books of poetry including Mind Honey (Autonomedia), Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire (BlazeVOX), and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems (Soft Skull Press).

Editor’s Note: I reviewed Zhadan’s novel The Orphanage in the March 2022 edition of Short Fuses.