#Natalka Bilotserkivets

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but the heart is hot  Like a warm clod of living earth.

Natalka Bilotserkivets, “Night Planes” (tr. Michael M. Naydan)

[thepoetrycurator]

Excerpt from the poem "We'll Not Die in Paris" by Natalka Bilotserkivets, translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky.

From IN THE HOUR OF WAR: POETRY FROM UKRAINE edited by Carolyn Forche and Ilya Kaminsky.

[salamanderinspace]

LOVE IN KYIV by Natalka Bilotserkivets More terrible is love in Kyiv than Magnificent Venetian passions. Butterflies Fly light and maculate into bright tapers – Dead caterpillars’ brilliant wings aflame! And spring has lit the chestnuts’ candles! Cheap lipstick’s tender taste, The daring innocence of miniskirts, And these coiffures, that are not cut quite right – Yet image, memory, and signs still move us… Tragically obvious, like the latest hit. You’ll die here by a scoundrel’s knife, Your blood will spread like rust inside a brand New Audi in an alley in Tartarka. You’ll plunge here from a balcony, the sky, Down headlong to your dirty little Paris Dressed in a blouse of secretarial white. You can’t discern the weddings from the deaths… For love in Kyiv is more terrible than Ideas of New Communism: specters Emerge in the intoxicated nights Out of Bald Mountain, bearing in their hands Red flags and pots of red geraniums. You’ll die here by a scoundrel’s knife, You’ll plunge here from a balcony, the sky, in A brand-new Audi from an alley in Tartarka Down headlong to your dirty little Paris Your blood will spread like rust upon a blouse of secretarial white…. –Natalka Bilotserkivets

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I want to be who I won't be. I want to become who I'm already not. I want to know how to hear - to forget how a knife carves out your name.

Natalka Bilotserkivets, from her poem ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, from “Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow | Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets”, translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky (Lost Horse Press, 2021)

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Swallows

a last attempt to fly off somewhere from this coop from this stable from this bedroom where the urgent sweet smells of an animal’s nest hang

there to there—to heavens touched where electrical wires are like a pedestal and the fiery strokes of a rainbow the unsettled comforts of a poor life

like black mittens from our fingers like the black and white keys of a piano like festival fireworks at night they fly from their native nest

they’re already there—invisible like the endless sound of the final abyss so fearless and so cold the solitary flights of our lives

Natalka Bilotserkivets, translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky

[ruknowhere]

Swallows

a last attempt to fly off somewhere

from this coop from this stable from

this bedroom where the urgent sweet

smells of an animal’s nest hang

there to there—to heavens touched

where electrical wires are like a pedestal

and the fiery strokes of a rainbow

the unsettled comforts of a poor life

like black mittens from our fingers

like the black and white keys of a piano

like festival fireworks at night

they fly from their native nest

they’re already there—invisible

like the endless sound of the final abyss

so fearless and so cold

the solitary flights of our lives

-Natalka Bilotserkivets

[pasdetrois]

- Natalka Bilotserkivets, “Night Planes” (tr. Michael M. Naydan)

[pasdetrois]

- Natalka Bilotserkivets (tr. Andrew Sorokowski)

[pasdetrois]

- Natalka Bilotserkivets (tr. Michael M. Naydan)

[pasdetrois]

in one of the cities where at an uncertain time capricious fate acknowledges us where in the evening you can hear jazz in restaurants in the morning — bells from the gothic arches water-lilies bloom in the canals there people drink coffee there and later on beer and the bicycles of radiant schoolgirls fly in their sweet way in flocks

Natalka Bilotserkivets, from “Hotel Central” (tr. Michael M. Naydan)

[pasdetrois]

at three AM God like Bosch will come to Hotel Central from the heavenly halls with insects playing clarinets with mosquitoes drinking submissive blood with frogs and snails; with fish, too; and all your love is just caviar in the repositories of hell

Natalka Bilotserkivets, from “Hotel Central” (tr. Michael M. Naydan)

[pasdetrois]

...only shadows remain  In moonlight. Look back:  The broad scent of autumn lies all around-  More tender than before, darker than before.

Natalka Bilotserkivets “A Farewell Elegy” (tr. Michael M. Naydan)

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Yesterday he was reading and drawing, today he played a little basketball, the clarinet. Hundreds of ordinary matters have bored him a little. Most often he thinks about barefoot wanderings. The wind drills a whistle tunnel in the cosmic blue.

Natalka Bilotserkivets, from her poem ‘Herbarium’, from “Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorry | Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets”, translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, Lost Horse Press, 2021

[kitchen-light]

Natalka Bilotserkivets, her poem “February”, translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky, from her collection “Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow”, Lost Horse Press, 2021