"A Home to Freedom" and other poems
by Yuliya Musakovska
Translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and the author
A HOME TO FREEDOM
The man that became my home
wants to become my freedom
but he's failing
He thinks that I'm
overplaying,
overexaggerating,
overwriting the words of familiar songs,
ravaging the principles of calligraphy,
distorting the words of prayers,
acting recklessly,
making a mountain out of a molehill,
crushing a fly upon a wheel,
and all that
How will our home have room for
so many great things,
so many phenomena and creatures,
so many implausible characters,
natural disasters and global issues
Our home is not a bottomless pit,
it cannot hold it all
it will explode and disappear off the face of the earth
There is only one solution:
it will learn to grow,
gradually growing and growing
until it fills everything around us
until it becomes freedom itself
THE SPARTAN BOY
The war that you've been carrying
in your shirt pocket
gnawed a hole in you as if it were a fox.
Your heart keeps falling out.
I am sewing the hole shut,
firmly holding the edges together
with my numb, unbending fingers.
I hope it stays closed a little longer.
When the city falls asleep,
the black caterpillars of scars wake up.
And only death’s head moths will emerge.
The city pours steam out of its nostrils
and sets its hills like horns.
You have a vision of your mates’ faces
at the bottom of the lake —
a dark fairy tale from his childhood that came to life.
Although you were polite, respected elders, and were easily content.
Actually, there is no such thing as justice.
The scratched steel mug you never part with,
your superficial sleep, and fierce hate of fireworks.
What a lucky one, he could have lost so much more,
he's almost whole, they say.
You have chosen me because of my skillful, sensitive fingers.
I’m comfortable holding a needle with them.
A fox's muzzle is peering out of your pocket,
licking its lips, recalling what my bird of peace tasted like.
JESUS OF WAR
Oh my Lord adorned by roses,
clothed in spiderwebs and dew
I will bring to you past chasms and stumps
ten bullets between my ribs
How did they appear, fruit of what land
who raised them and nourished them so fully
They soar off, drunk with impunity
with their ice-cold stingers
Oh my Lord, so ardent and disheartened
wearing thorns above your high forehead
How does it feel to walk wearing a crown
barefoot through the ravaged land
The wind will cast a ball into your face —
these are smells of something human, burning
Oh my Lord shine and bloom abundantly
while inertia is driving us forth
While numbers multiply in the matrix
while it's still early morning, sleep, my Lord
Let us hold on but what's left to hold on to?
Rose petals, raindrops and thorns
Yuliya Musakovska is an award-winning Ukrainian poet and translator, a member of PEN Ukraine. She is the author of five poetry collections, The God of Freedom (2021), Men, Women and Children (2015), Hunting the Silence (2014), Masks (2011), and Exhaling, Inhaling (2010). A translator of Tomas Transtromer into Ukrainian and of Ukrainian authors into English, her own poems have been translated into English, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Polish, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Chinese, etc. Yuliya is the recipient of numerous literary awards in Ukraine, including Krok Publishing House’s DICTUM Prize (2014), the Smoloskyp Poetry Award (2010), the Ostroh Academy Vytoky Award (2010), the Bohdan Antonych Prize (2009), and the Hranoslov Award (2008). She lives in Lviv.
Olena Jennings is the author of the collection of poems Songs from an Apartment (Underground Books, 2017) and the chapbook Memory Project (2018). Her translations of Ukrainian poetry have appeared in the anthology Words for War (Academic Studies Press, 2017, together with Oksana Lutsyshyna) as well as Consequence, Asymptote, The Kitchen Poet, Poetry International, Wolf, and other journals. A volume of Jennings’s translations of Iryna Shuvalova’s verse, Pray to the Empty Walls, was published in 2019 by Lost Horse Press. Her translation of Vasyl Makhno’s collection Paper Bridge is forthcoming from Plamen Press. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series.