by Stephen Komarnyckyj
i.
Blyat he sputtered as the 1972 Lada with a spider's web
Tracery of cracks across the windscreen
Wound up the black ribbon of the road,
It was here the Anglijtsi had died
Here where he found a squashed pellet that had passed through the thigh
Or so he believed, of one of the light brigade
His cousin had part of a tunic
A brass button, a strip of brocade
(My lips parched
For the taste of the Alma
A thread of quicksilver in the rear view mirror)
Here the cavalry had rode
Into a veritable wall of lead, he said when we parked, the sweep
Of his tanned arm taking in
The stipled, tawny, green basin
Quiet now as a watercolour,
They had died
And laid among the grass,
Horses grazed among the corpses,
Their tails swishing away the flies.
He had been there only once at twilight
And felt something brush his skin
Light as a lizard's tongue
The touch of the dead
The touch of the living
But it was nothing, he said
Something unseen,
And no sooner felt, than gone.
ii.
He was peeling a boiled egg
In the shadow of a poplar tree,
By the roadside. Beneath us the parched red earth fell away
I could hear the Russian broadside
See a rivulet of British blood
Flow into shape
Like a child's sketch of a tree,
Over the yellow rocks,
The dust of Crimea's indifferent clay;
The egg white was a blank eye,
Proffered to me,
Could I hear the call of the Mechet did I yearn to pray
To Christ, Allah or Artemis
Rain falling through temples open to the sky
Bruising the stone
The fevered soldiers dying of typhus
The English voices sifted through Steppe Grass, Cypress.
Christ...Jesus...
iii.
I know that Tychyna travelled here
I know, or think I know, or imagine,
Him picking his way among the white rocks
Where I follow his imaginary footsteps,
To the sea miles away, not Homer's sea
But the shield of Achilles in the bay,
Where all our futures are reflected,
I take Vasya's metal detector, place,
The headphones on my ears and listen
For the echo of a bullet, an old brass button
The fragment of a sabre, but there is nothing
The faint hiss of electricity
But the dead ground is empty of death today.
Blyat. Useless English durak.
He takes it from me and sweeps
Reading the absence like grace notes.
iv.
The lunar landscape
Where the light brigade rode
And wetted the Tavrian soil
With British blood,
A smile
At once reptilian and sad
Flitted across Lord Cardigan's face
I tear the bread of exile
It tastes of Steppe grass.
v.
I know that Tychyna laid here too, in these barracks reeking of creosote
And listened to the timbers creak
And click
A dialogue with the summer heat and saw the Crimean Sky
The moon, the sea of tranquillity
The apple tree
Shifting starlight
He wrote of a woman raped near here
Her flight through the forest to stand
On a rock in the Black Sea
Tendrils of blood trickling down her thigh
How she laid at last on the waves to drift
Into the sun
Like a woman from the Kalevala,
Perhaps he wrote looking out
At the apple tree and starlight
Knowing the heart
Must bear what it cannot absolve, and laid to sleep
Among the insects who he came to love
If only for this they simply live.
vi.
His lips grazed in the dusk of her throat
She stirred in her sleep
Her eyes opening
The Sea of Tranquillity the filgree of shadow cast
By the apple tree
On feather grass
The syllables sound hoarse in her Turkic voice
Yet soft also
She sighs the sea's fricative noise
He looks beyond her his eyes
Fix on the respiration of the sea its undulating shadows
Relapse down the coastal shelf he dies
Back into himself the beach where they repose
Her taste brine on his lips his touch all her skin knows.
Stephen Komarnyckyj's literary translations and poems have appeared in Index on Censorship, Modern Poetry in Translation and many other journals. He is the holder of three PEN awards and a highly regarded English language poet whose work has been described as articulating "what it means to be human" (Sean Street). He runs Kalyna Language Press which publishes his own poetry and translations and has taught at The Poetry School and translated a series of Ukrainian poets and their blogs for The Poetry School site under the title "Stanzas for Ukraine."
