Love in Kyiv

 Written by Natalka Bilotserkivets and translated by Andrew Sorokowsky

 

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 Tatarka.

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 Tatarka

Down headlong to your dirty little Paris

Your blood will spread like rust

upon a blouse of secretarial white.

Natalka Bilotserkivets is an acclaimed poet, editor, and translator. Her poems have been anthologized and translated into a dozen of European languages.