“Bleed — My Heart — Bleed”: Ukrainian Poems of War by Boris Khersonsky, Iya Kiva, and Vasyl Makhno

On February 24 Russian forces invaded Ukraine on multiple fronts. Boris Khersonsky (b. 1950), one of Ukraine’s most prominent writers, posted “Missa in tempore belli” on Facebook, commenting, “This poem was written in 2014 in unfond memory of that year. I’m repeating it today.” Friends commented on the distressing aptness of what originated as a response to the invasion of Crimea. Khersonsky is based in Odessa, a key, historic Black Sea port for trade and strategy. Odessa is one of the points of the current invasion. There Khersonsky chairs the department of clinical psychology at Odessa National University. During the Soviet period he played an important role in Underground culture and was published throughout the USSR in samizdat (unofficial works distributed through networks of acquaintances).

For most of his career Khersonsky has written in Russian, but in recent years he has, like other Russian-language Ukrainian writers, shifted to publishing in Ukrainian. Nevertheless, he published “Missa in tempore belli” in an eponymous collection with a revered Russian independent literary press based in St. Petersburg, Ivan Limbakh. On their LiveJournal feed in June 2014, he wrote, “This little book contains poems written over the last few months against the background of tragic events in my country — written with a level of emotional stress I haven’t experienced in a long time. The paradox is that the book is being published in Russia. Even for me this serves just as additional proof that poetry has its own territory, and this territory is language. The Russian language will continue to exist on both sides of the border, and literature will be the bridge that unites us even in tempore belli.”

“Missa in tempore belli” probes the territory of language in unexpected ways. In this instance Khersonsky connects Russian not with Ukrainian but with another imperial language, Latin. In recent years he has worked increasingly with the ancient, Slavonic language of the Russian Orthodox liturgy. Here he draws the Latin mass into conversation with Russian church and colloquial language alike. In part through its end rhyme, the poem swings from moments of strange coalescence to moments of bathos and disjuncture. It poses questions it doesn’t answer: How do we pray collectively on days of such human ugliness? How do we make East and West speak together? How do we survive the legacies of empires? Khersonsky’s poem presents spiritual solace alongside raging grief.

— Martha M. F. Kelly

Boris Khersonsky

Missa in tempore belli

1. Kyrie

Lord, have mercy on us,

if You are for us, who can be against us?

Christ, have mercy on us,

especially if our hours are numbered.

Lord, have mercy on us,

especially in days of war

Kyrie eleison.

Christe eleison

Kyrie eleison

2. Gloria

Gloria in excelsis Deo

et in terra pax

hominibus bonae voluntatis.

Glory to God in the highest — wondrous are Your works!

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth — more war.

Glory to God in the highest — be not troubled, soldier, nightingales!

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth — bodies flail,

arms flung wide. People’s will is evil.

Thus it has been and always will.

We praise you, soldier, slender of neck, sharp of throat.

We bless you, soldier, who on bayonet raise up the foe,

We lift on high your long dying groan.

God is cruel at times, but still better than earthly thrones.

We bless you, mister General,

we glorify you, mister President,

you who have robbed us blind,

did the Lord trample down death with death for your kind?

“Yes, sir!” says the General, hand to visor.

He’s taken an oath to submit to his own dear tsar.

But his own dear tsar has flown up on a branch and cries, “Cocka-doodle-doo!”

He has a comb of gold, and a log in each eye, too.

Be glorified in the highest, God, behold not what’s going on down here.

The bullet’s a fool, the bayonet a good boy, one hit — and no more boy to fear.

With the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God the Father.

Amen.

Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris.

Amen.

3. Credo

I believe that God is God alone,

He is Lord of his own.

He is the peace created by Him,

He is the light by whom the world is illumined,

And when battle flags fly, He is their Wind.

Out of black concrete holes the rockets fly.

The unseen world attacks the world in sight.

I believe that in Christ this God was made flesh,

and was crucified on the cross in sculpture and on canvas,

outside of time and yet within time, outside of space and yet on a hill,

between two thieves, a kind of earth-to-earth.

But if life is a sea, Christ stands at the helm

and steers the ship of the universe.

A ship with hundreds of thousands of cannons on board.

I doubt it can dock in the heavenly port.

Christ said, “I bring not peace, but the sword,

and with it, the chance to lie dead in the earth,

but when the reveille plays on the archangel’s trump,

the graves will open right up.

And the skeletons will arise and before our eyes

they’ll grow muscle and then a cover of skin,

and they’ll tread the battlefield in delirium

always, forever and ever, for weather of weathers,

for trenches of trenches, for tranches of tranches,

where once they lay side by side, feeding the lice.

And the lice grew as big as typhoidal cows on the kolhoz,

and the tanks rumbled as good as armored tractors down the rows.”

4. Sanctus

Holy, holy, holy, the Lord, God of might!

In other words — God of the heavenly hosts, or of the heavenly lights!

You went out with us to war, you seized the foe by the throat!

You filled earth and heaven with Your glory like a jug with wine.

You let the earth turn upside down.

Hosannah in the highest! We’ll see you around in the next world.

5. Benedictus

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord in a glorious

and frightening time, a time of troubles, a time of war,

blessed are those who walk row by row, each one shall be a hero,

salvos three and into the ground they go.

And once again — Hosannah in the highest! Hosannah on high!

The further into battle, the fewer heroes left behind.

6. Agnus

Lamb of God, who has freed all people from deadly snares,

Lamb of God, who has borne the immeasurable weight of our sins,

Lamb of God, who has counted and pardoned every fall,

Lamb of God, have mercy on us all.

Lamb of God, Son of the Father, Light from true Light,

Lamb of God, Savior of constellations, planets and stars in the sky,

Lamb of God, who crown your iconostasis,

Lamb of God, have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, little lamb lain on the altar,

a time of war has come. Cinders rise from the earth.

Grant us peace, we are sated with eternal fire.

They say, “We’re starting a war again.”

Dona nobis pacem. Amen.

Translated from the Russian by Martha M. F. Kelly

¤

Ukraine’s Iya Kiva (b. 1984) is no stranger to war. In 2014, the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine saw a Russian-backed incumbent ousted from Ukraine’s presidency; soon after, Russia forcibly annexed Crimea. Kiva’s hometown of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine also became a battlefield. A number of Kiva’s friends and acquaintances perished, while Kiva was personally threatened for speaking out about the war and forced to flee her home.

Not surprisingly for a poet who has spent most of the last eight years as a war refugee, themes of memory, violence, trauma, and borders/transitions run through Kiva’s poems. According to Kiva — who started out as a formal poet — she began to write “completely differently” after 2014, frequently employing techniques of free verse, collage, and montage and eschewing most punctuation. With its tonal complexity, its interplay of the everyday and the quasi-religious, “The Year of Ukraine” demonstrates much of what makes Kiva’s recent work so compelling. While some of her other work explores states of alienation and separation — including the feeling of being a stranger in one’s own country — in “The Year of Ukraine,” Kiva explicitly seeks to contextualize war as broader than one person’s experience.

— Katherine E. Young

Iya Kiva

The Year of Ukraine

see here we got what we wanted

now Serhiy Nigoyan’s graffiti on the wall

in the square across the way kids play at war

in Donbas the adults are also at play

a square looms on Google Maps another square

it’s a house it’s a boy with a rifle in his hands

if they tell him to shoot he surely will shoot

eff your mother our common motherland

at the store folks load whole sacks with macaroni

and afterwards bury the boxes somewhere

what’s that what crawls down that distant slope

it’s your coffin carried by security troops

we were here you’ll say no we haven’t been here

someone else was killed by sniper fire here

and snow nailed those who came after to earth

the lord’s summer has gone it wasn’t enough

Translated from the Russian by Katherine E. Young

¤

By the time I met Ukrainian poet Vasyl Makhno (b. 1964) he had already made his home in New York City. A New Yorker, he remains intimately connected to Ukraine and was deeply affected by the events taking place today. He is instrumental in bringing Ukrainian literature to New York, organizing readings and talking to me about what it means to be a Ukrainian writer, someone tasked with keeping the Ukrainian language and culture alive.

“It seemed to me that I had written my final poem about the war. I wrote a few about Maidan and the events in Donbas and Luhansk. Poetry, of course, should react, and so I reacted. But on February 24 I experienced real shock and pain from the tragic news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I couldn’t call it anything other than ‘War.’ In the poem there are two allusions: to Pavlo Tychyna, a major Ukrainian poet who in 1919 wrote a poem that spoke of “torn apart Kyiv” and about the Russian poets Andrey Bely, Alexander Blok, and Sergey Yesenin, and the other to the 12th-century epic poem The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign, which is a common memory of Eastern Slavic literature, though it is about the campaign of the Novhorod-Siverskyi prince Ihor. Sadly, my poetry had to be dressed in army camouflage and had to look through black columns of smoke, in order to speak the language of truth about the difficult fate of my homeland.”

— Olena Jennings

Vasyl Makhno

War

Lord, the way Tychyna writes:

“And Bely, and Blok, and Yesenin”

the way they surrounded us

on all four sides

give us strength and power

a hastily packed suitcase and bread

naturally their sly foxes lie

that we have neither shields nor centuries

Ihor leads us somewhere

over the Don with his regiments

today with the February snow

and tomorrow with a bloody shield

and their dark forces come from Tmutarakan

and Mokshas and Chud

shoot at our location

hit at the positions we take

so what is there in The Tale of Ihor’s Campaign
and what is there in ancient sounds

you — jumping barefoot as a wolf

spreading the spit of the devil

reached the rivers and borders

reached my clenched heart

your blackened icons

can’t even be cleansed with milk

Lord, the way Tychyna writes

about Kyiv — the Messiah — about the country

why didn’t we learn these poems by heart?

Bleed — my heart — bleed

Translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings