Ten poems
Ten poems about war, life, and hope that I wrote during the last 1.5 years.
I started writing poetry when I was ten years old. Poetry is the words written with our hearts: unfiltered and raw. It’s when we are our most vulnerable selves. The poems below are some of the most honest, intimate, and personal words from my heart that I’ve ever shared.
Poem 1
April 4, 2022
I want to rewind time, so this war would never happen, and heartless evil creatures would never step on Ukrainian soil. My heart is bleeding with the blood of every girl and woman, who’s been tortured and wounded so cruel, that we are even afraid to think about it. I want to brush the hair of Ukrainian children, and comb everything out that caused it to turn gray. My soul is aching for all tortured people who lie dead on the streets, and their bodies so mutilated that you wonder how evil like that can exist in this world. I want to hug the people of Ukraine so tight, that their pain will go away and disappear into the air. And they will be able to breathe again, and to live again. My eyes are crying in unison with thousands of mothers who lost their sons, with daughters who lost their dads, with everyone whose life was taken from them and destroyed. I want to be a big white bird that will shield all Ukrainian people and animals with her wings from the evil that Russian monsters brought to them. When everyone is safe under her feathers, the bird will turn into a dragon and will burn to death everyone who hurt them.
Poem 2
July 16, 2022
We were living our lives, and then came this war. During these months, we got so much older. But so many of us won’t get older anymore. For so many each day becomes the last. Forever 52, Forever 30, Forever 19, Forever 3 months. I wish it was a bad dream from which I could wake up.
Poem 3
August 31, 2022
It hurts to write: “This is Ukraine during the war”, share photos of destruction and grief. Read news about children being killed while they sleep. It hurts to raise money for weapons, evacuations and prostheses. It hurts to see your loved ones cry. It hurts to feel so helpless. It’s still hard to believe that everything I see on my screen is true. And this is Ukraine, and it’s 2022. My mind and heart can’t fully accept this reality. I have hope that it’s just a bad dream, a mistake. I see destroyed houses with black holes instead of windows. I feel these holes in my heart. They remind me that I’m awake.
Poem 4
Feb 17, 2023
Eastern Europe We are wildflowers growing against all odds. We don’t need much – just a small piece of land where we can live in peace. This world can be so cruel to us, but each spring, we grow no matter what, and we bloom and refuse to cease to exist. We may look fragile and small, but resilience runs strong in our stems and leaves. As a famous quote goes: “They wanted to bury us, they didn’t know that we were seeds.”
Poem 5
March 2, 2023
De-occupied Destroyed and mutilated Ukrainian houses. Russian bullets on a beautiful Ukrainian plate. The inscription on every wall and door: “We don’t fly, and we won’t let others” and family photographs on the floor. I thought that this plate symbolized Ukraine. So beautiful, and with Russian bullets inside its heart. But then I thought, no, it’s not like that. It’s Ukraine serving Russians their bullets back. It symbolizes Ukrainian fight.
Poem 6
April 12, 2023
How can you talk about the genocide? In your daily life, in your conversations? “Hi, have you seen the latest Russian atrocity? And by the way, how is your family, how is work?” It feels surreal, it feels almost impossible. How can you fit the genocide into a small talk? My mom calls and asks how my week was. She lives an ocean away, for years we haven’t seen each other. I think of her health, and I talk about my cat. I don’t talk about the genocide with my mother. My husband comes home from work. He asks: “Have you seen that?” “Yes.” I hug him, so he can’t see the tears in my eyes. We don’t talk about the genocide. We go for a walk. We talk about birds, and flowers, and clouds in the skies. My neighbor is waving to me from her backyard. “Hi, how are you, how is your day?” She is smiling. The sky is clear and blue. I don’t talk about the genocide with my neighbor. I smile back and say: “Hi, I’m good. How are you?” The genocide keeps happening, everyone keeps living their lives, I continue to live mine. I don’t talk with people around me about what I can’t stop talking online.
Poem 7
May 27, 2023
Last year evil came closer than ever. It spread its tentacles, trying to get my loved ones. It chased them away from their home, and its cold breath touched their backs as they ran from the bombs, missiles, and tanks. I saw people I trust betraying me in the most ugly way, I saw people I trust lying to me and themselves, I saw people I trust calling to appease this evil and give up. I don’t know what scared me the most: The evil, or how fast my friends were ready to sacrifice the people I love. In the past, I felt so sorry for people who lived through WW1 and then WW2. I thought how unlucky they were to be born during those times. I couldn’t imagine that this evil would come back. And this time, it will be my turn. My turn to make a choice: to turn away or fight. My turn to lose and my turn to grieve. My turn to see clearly what’s wrong and what’s right. My turn to find the courage and my turn to speak. Today I turned 31. I’m not as naive as I was just a year ago. I grew teeth, thicker skin, and I learned how to bite. This evil took the masks off everything and everyone I know. I’m glad that when it came to take a mask off me, It only helped to discover my strength and my light.
Poem 8
June 24, 2023
You see Ukrainians making lots of jokes and memes. You say how funny and brave they are, and you couldn’t possibly be like them during war. But this is just a shield in order to stay sane, because sometimes this is all they have when they can’t take it anymore. Sometimes you read about people whom Russians killed, and it doesn’t make your heart stop. Sometimes you watch a video of a boy who should have lived, but he won’t, and it hits you, it burns through your defense and it hurts. I often wonder what world we’ll leave for our kids. We don’t change it fast enough, they grow too quick. At least I try, I tell myself. At least we try. Again, again, and again. Until we win.
Poem 9
July 6, 2023
I grew up reading Russian literature. I studied it and wrote summaries and essays. I memorized Russian poems. I knew by heart Russian sayings and famous phrases. I didn’t like reading Belarusian literature. I thought it was quite scarce, dark, and boring. I never questioned why there were so few Belarusian writers. And why their works were so sad, bitter, and melancholic. I thought maybe Russians were smarter and more gifted. I accepted their superiority without any hesitation. I didn’t know about mass killings, persecution, and censorship. I kept reading Russian literature and didn’t ask any questions. When people ask where are all the famous Ukrainian writers, Ignoring centuries of Russian aggression. When they say that maybe Ukrainians are less creative and talented, I see people who don’t ask the right questions. Open your eyes and see thousands of graves. Years of death: 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st centuries. The latest date was just a few days ago. These are Ukrainian writers. The ones you didn’t hear about because they lie in forever silence. Russians are indeed very creative and talented in their methods of killing and violence.
Poem 10
July 9, 2023
Humanity My little brother graduated this month. Smiling, I look at his photo from the ceremony. Someone’s little brother was killed on the front. Crying, they look at his photo and coffin covered with the Ukrainian flag. My little sister is enjoying her summer. She is picking flowers and bringing them home. Someone’s little sister was raped and killed by Russian soldiers. Her siblings bring flowers to her grave and mourn. One moment I smile, the next moment I grieve. Every second I hold my heart very tight so it won’t break into a million little pieces. People look at me and say: You are too emotional. You need to stop feeling so deeply. Casualties are normal during war. I look at them and say: In order to save our humanity, we need to start feeling more.
Warmly,
Darya
Email: daryazorka@substack.com
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Thank you for sharing these with us. I can feel them all: the emotion leaps from the screen.
Since the full-scale invasion I’ve sought out Ukrainian poetry (in translation) as the medium which comes the closest to being able to express the full horror of what’s going on (though by ‘closet’, I only mean that poetry can do about 1% of the job, while everything else does about 0.01%). And poetry tends to be in the vanguard of culture because it can be written swiftly. The fragmentary nature of poetry can sometimes paradoxically add up to more substance than a whole slab of prose. The very silences between lines sometimes bear a vast weight.
Even more than the rage and grief, bewilderment at the enormity of it all is the quality that most unites the Ukrainian poetry I’ve read so far. Yours is the first poetry I’ve read that was written in English that has this. I’m afraid there’s some real dreck out there by established Anglophone writers. (I do not recommend reading ‘Resistance’ by Simon Armitage, let alone ‘Near Izium’ by Paul Muldoon, but I’ll mention them so as not to make a sweeping assertion with no evidence.)
Early in the war Halyna Kruk seemed to be saying that even poetry was no use to/within Ukraine: ‘We speak an unintelligible language, where there’s no room for poetry.’ https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/06/27/war-is-not-a-metaphor/ But since then she has published a collection, ‘A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails’, which has been translated into English, so hopefully she feels it’s possible to communicate something across the gap now.
The best poetry I’ve found about looking on at Ukraine from outside is a short burst of material from Iryna Shuvalova, that she wrote in the very first days of the war (in Ukrainian, though the English translation is presented here without comment: https://www.irynashuvalova.com/en/war-poems .)
I can see a progression in your work here, which is probably obvious to you, so forgive me: incredulity and wishes in 2022, then acceptance and adaptation settles in in early 2023 with the imagery of seeds and serving bullets back and your own strength, and this summer the reality has settled in enough that ‘you’ – or the narrator self, which is never identical with the living person – has been able to become to some degree reflective. I guess this is a survival adaptation for those of us who are not inside the war experience but nevertheless live with it, while poetry from within Ukraine continues to be an intense in-the-moment response.
I have also been writing poetry since about day four of the war. I hadn’t done so since my dubious adolescent works nearly 30 years ago, but suddenly it felt imperative to my psychological survival. However, I’m editing and polishing with an eye to eventual ‘publication’, so I have not shared anything online. I put ‘publication’ in scare quotes to indicate that I mean gatekept publishing, i.e. official literary outlets of some kind. This is hopefully a realistic ambition as I’m a professional writer and editor in other fields. The English-language poetry scene is very small but I’m cherishing the hope that adding some not-dreadful poetry about Ukraine to it would be another strand in the ongoing awareness-raising and -maintenance mission we are all on.
I hope you’ll keep writing poems as intense as these. Thanks again.
I've tried reading this several times. This won't be my only comment. I get as far as the first poem and my brain just stops me reading the rest. Because those last two verses. A dragon to destroy Ukraine's enemies -- YES!