Everything will change. Even this perpetual warmth

will change. The fog's settled steadiness will shift.

The wet orthography of the grass will lose its inherently

clean line along with its stem's expressive calligraphy.

The measure of things, which you accept so easily, will change,

the voice, which grew thicker in the dark, will get hoarse,

October, which you know by its broken light

and oversaturated space, will change too.

It will go like this: a bird's lightness and rage

people, who forestall the evening chill by singing,

will start to remember winter like a forgotten language,

they'll read it, re-read it, recognize it.

And everything will change for you, too,

you won't this warning, this fear

of the blackbird in the morning circling the sharp,

warm trees, beating its wings against the blind gleam.

Lands that freeze to the core.

Sunny days for the brave and the luckless.

Your breath will change, in the end, when you recite

a memorized list of apologies, dogmas and faults.

Dryness will change, and the wetness from the lowlands

will change, the field's winter cold will change,

the stubborn October grasses and women's inflections

will change. Like in fall, like in fall.

~~~

Don't say it aloud,

don't let the coastal span of another utterance

roll off your tongue.

It's a subtle, innate, human skill

of non-articulation, omission, awkwardness,

concealing something light behind your heart,

something so light, so sweet, so unsharable,

this wild generosity of not burdening anyone

with things that might make their face twitch.

And then speech starts, like the start of a cold,

it warms your lungs, and the fever sets in,

and since early August anxious people have been wandering around

glowing from within with this mysterious light.

~~~

...let him speak now, or forever hold

his silence, let him explain obvious things-

how flames descend on lovers' shoulders,

how despair, like a butcher, is scooping the world's entrails

onto the morning's cobblestones of a September city,

let him speak now, while it's still possible

to at least save somebody, to at least help somebody.

Let him tell us how another descent into

the deep current will end, how immersion in the deep brown mixture of hash,

in the depths of darkness, when water, like silence,

lasts longer than any language, is more meaningful

than words uttered passionately, stronger than the declarations

between two people struck by the dance of love.

Let him warn this lighthearted pair, who are carried,

like a fish by the rhythm of groundwater,

by the change in wind, by the early October sun, let him warn them,

that everyone will be cast ashore, everyone torn from within

by the cold of shattered glass,

no one will manage to stop the flow,

no one will read the heavenly book,

written in the dead language of autumn.

Rather let him speak now, while they, enchanted,

count birds like the letters of a name scrawled by a child's hand,

let him speak, let him try to break

this joy of grown-ups,

who stand facing one another,

as if to guard their loneliness.

The birds' agile dance,

the logic of warm gestures,

bodies like letters forming

joyful sentences.

Anyway, everything was clear from the start. And whom did it stop?

Whom did it scare? 

The eternal sound of a river.

Eternal warnings and eternal courage.

They are so strong as they migrate South.

So touching when they return home.

Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry by Serhiy Zhadan

Translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk