Love in Kyiv by Natalka Bilotserkivets

 

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 Tartarka.

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 Tartarka

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 anthologised and translated into a dozen of European languages.