DECOMPOSITION

all is quiet on the eastern front

well, I’ve had it up to here

at the moment of death, metal gets hot

and people get cold

don’t talk to me about Luhansk [1]

it’s long since turned into—hansk

Lu had been razed

to the crimson pavement

my friends are hostages

and I can’t reach them, I can’t do netsk

to pull them out of the basements

from under the rubble

yet here you are, writing poems

ideally slick poems

high-minded gilded poems

beautiful as embroidery

there’s no poetry about war

just decomposition

only letters remain

and they all make a single sound—rrr

Pervomaisk has been split into pervo and maisk

into particles in primeval flux

war is over once again

yet peace has not come

and where’s my deb, alts, evo?

no poet will be born there again

no human being

I stare into the horizon

it has narrowed into a triangle

sunflowers dip their heads in the field

black and dried out, like me

I have gotten so very old

no longer Lyuba

just—ba

Notes

[1] Luhans'k, Donets'k, Pervomais'k, and Debal'tsevo (Debal'tseve) are all cities in Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas region.

Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky