Translated from the Russian by Yana Kane-Esrig
WARTIME POEMS
reality like a pensive woman
winds a strand of hair round a finger.
the window is streaked with rain.
seems like a bird pattern,
long-legged flowing cranes,
half-broken stone cattail buildings,
rotting waterlily entryways.
be sure not to touch anything
in this terrifying dream. pretend you are a guest.
a balcony torn off by an explosion—
a headless horseman—
dangles down the flank of a white, mangled horse
to pick the tulips
planted with warm hands by apt. 56
it’s impossible
to create the same world twice.
Heraclitus knows this, a bomb knows this.
only the tulips are unscathed, two of them.
they still shelter the care lavished by the woman,
like a switched off light bulb, holding warmth.
if you could return to the past
to the day before the war began,
how would you spend that day?
give it thought. recognize your own helplessness.
who would you have saved?
everyone would’ve thought you were crazy.
perhaps the Lord lives a day behind
Satan pulled ahead
by half a body length like swimming
into the future.
that’s why it’s so hard for the Lord to save us, his children,
and weed out, ward off
the madness of war and disaster.
winter evening carved
a cube from glowing marble,
making a winter unicorn.
munching ice apples.
mouth steaming,
a white bird, warm moments,
golden buttery sparks
in the evening windows.
you, wintry vegetable-garden scarecrow
of peacetime winters,
why did you hobble into this free verse?
this boat has no bottom,
no oars, and the sails are rotted away.
the ashes of memories worth their weight in gold,
worth their weight in entropy.
I got stuck in the logic of the tax code,
I lost a pirate’s brazen
improvisation.
time to break free of directives
and petitions.
in the evening, a squirrel in a pine tree flashes bronze
like a bundle of wires
and glides into the tree crown.
a bat sprays everywhere with its ultrasound—
a small flying fountain,
the mark of a night predator.
how fine this feels.
never mind there’s a bomb over me,
and under me a diesel tank.
black smoke flies low, a magpie.
a dangling shutter—a knocked-out tooth,
held by a skin strand.
the airplane in the sky is a letter
that no one wants to read.
the smoke of death, a hookah,
black tenacious grass
sprouts inside muscle and bone,
inside feelings and thoughts.
there are no more seasons of the year.
just seasons of the war.
sunrise.
a stranger, a woman
like a candle
melted at a slant by fear. her face—а stub
wrapped tight in yellow skin.
her mink coat with a singed sleeve, she walks
cautious but steady
to the store, to take her place in line.
out of the inertia of faith
she says a prayer, but the words
slip through her fingers—
live minnows from a child’s hands.
a blast somewhere close. she falls
to the half-frozen soil, a rag doll.
God’s child, intact, she gets up now.
drop down, push-up, away from death,
she walks
on.
—
don’t ask me for whom.
don’t ask me.
this bell tolls for itself.
this bell, like a baby giraffe, has lost its way
inside the ghastly cement forest
of ruined houses, schools and hospitals,
wrecked tanks
incinerated cars.
howling sirens pulse like a sore tooth.
a new dawn in the earthly paradise.
in the garden of monsters.
good morning,
to all of you, good morning.
PRE-WAR POEMS
to the memory of Maya Shvartsman*
the garden rose anesthetized
by the first frost
rubs its severed throat against
the windowsill. it scrapes an iron nail over the bone. hard.
she died two weeks ago, and I pick up her death
like a seashell warmed in the sun.
a trinket, a souvenir, a chalice of music—all that is left of the life
of a poet. bewildered, I turn it over in my hands.
I touch the seashell with my tongue, press it to my ear,
strain my hearing, a diamond tensing its minute triangle muscles.
but I can’t hear any music, there’s just noise, noise.
etched, it rasps, but I know there’s music.
melody passed through a collider is beyond my comprehension;
beyond comprehension—what it’s like, to die.
what it’s like, to live in poems, and the memories of those who were close
and who were far away. yes, I’m a far-away one, but it’s all a lie,
those distances.
she died on black friday eve;
the rose petals scattered on the keyboard are beautiful
like curved black-and-red fish fins.
I was at my computer, eating kasha, when I found out.
I kept on chewing and sobbing—weird, it’s weird.
the pale echo of someone else’s pain rolling in; it’s not even pain
anymore;
we were neither friends nor enemies, just appreciated each other.
yes, she—a snowy, aristocratic bird, an egret
wearing the dainty heels of rhyme,
and I—a tattoo-covered pirate on the galley of free verse.
dima, always follow your path and ignore
the bozos, don’t listen to anyone, seal your ears
with melted wax, but listen deeply to the voice within…
and I listen, listen, listen, till nausea comes.
someone else’s death makes us a bit immortal,
like kids throwing snowballs
at an advancing black tank. she will dance forever
in the tall glass amphoras of her poems—
a woman with a supple, serpentine body, her black hair moist,
her black eyes like keyholes.
she wouldn’t have liked this simile, but
it’s my style, my world, what remains between us—
that’s how a rock climber’s fingers at an impossible altitude open
to slip off the rock.
the black water reached my chin, and I accidentally swallowed
a gulp of death—the strongest black coffee, waltzing heat,
a wave of nausea, and darkness there, outside the mind’s window.
and the garden rose doesn’t recognize anyone,
it rubs its severed throat against the windowsill.
a window floats in a cup of tea, like a fishing bobber,
and you dip your gaze into the sky,
as if it were a teabag on a string,
and the monument to Lenin still stands around
with its naturally-stony face—immobile
as a man urinating in the sea, the water up to his waist—
within the granite of history.
meanwhile war prowls somewhere nearby,
a minotaur with a blood-stained, broken horn.
unshaven boys armed with ribs are brawling,
and a bramble keeps mum, submerged up to its throat in the fog,
and the moon lows at dawn, bitterly, sadly,
like a cow in bedlam,
and autumn rays drop their slanted brass into the yard,
like a no-handrails staircase to the heavens.
a girl-wasp stings me, lulls me into living torpor,
leaves inside me
the voracious maggots of many worlds.
“what can be more beautiful than the red button?”
inquired the index finger of a general,
skin yellowed with nicotine.
* Translator's Note: Maya Shvartsman (1962-2019) was a Russian-language poet, literary and music critic, essayist, and professional musician
Dmitriy Blizniuk is a poet from Kharkiv, Ukraine. English translations of his poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, won the RHINO 2022 Translation Prize, were among the finalists for the 2025 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation, and were selected by Deep Vellum for the 2025 Best Literary Translations Anthology. ”The Red Forest,” a collection of his poetry translated into English, was published by Fowlpox Press in 2018 in Canada. Recent and forthcoming publications include Poetry Magazine, Rattle, and The Ilanot Review.
Yana Kane-Esrig came to the United States as a refugee from the Soviet Union. She holds a BSE degree from Princeton University, a PhD in Statistics from Cornell University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She won the 2024 RHINO Poetry Translation Prize, was a finalist for the 2025 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation, was selected for the 2025 and longlisted for the 2026 Deep Vellum Best Literary Translations Anthology, and received an honorable mention in the 2024 Stephen Mitchell Prize competition. She is grateful to Bruce Esrig for editing her English-language texts.
World Poetry Review 