Pratik : FROM PRATIK ARCHIVE : Two Poems from Ukraine by VASYL HOLOBORODKO

VASYL HOLOBORODKO

Two Poems from Ukraine

Summer/Fall 2018 Double Issue

The Dragon Hillforts

All over Ukraine,

around every town and village

high walls jut from the landscape,

legend calls them serpents.

Pottery historians – archaeologists – study

where they belong -

even radiocarbon dating

can’t specify their age;

if we cannot determine a date –

if we cannot fathom the age of the hillforts,

they must have been here

as long as the Ukrainians.

Those walls are called serpents because

once upon a time

a dragon was harnessed to a plough

by the holy blacksmiths Kuzma and Demian

this tillage jutted into the Serpent’s Wall.

What else could have ploughed these forts but a dragon!

Epiphany:

a dragon – no-dragon –

a symbol, by definition, of:

“someone who possesses great power”.

The hillforts were built to protect

against the cold creeping in from the forest,

so some people believe,

or for protection against

raw meat eaters from the forest,

so others believe,

or for protection against

invaders from the forest,

so the third party believes.

But no, dragon ploughing did not raise those hillforts,

our grandfathers wrapped them

around every town and village

to protect the dragon

from the cold given off by the forest,

from the raw meat eaters of the forest,

from the invaders lurking in the forest.

Epiphany:

dragon – no-dragon ––

a symbol, by definition, of:

“someone who wields great power

whose purpose is to observe our Custom.”

So rising all over Ukraine,

encircling every town and village

lofty hillforts,

dragon hillforts,

still protect our Dragon,

still protect our Custom.

Every year, the hillforts grow taller,

not because we, with every hatful, build them up little by little.

but because the graves of warriors force them upward,

defenders of our Dragon,

defenders of our Custom

buried in the hillforts,

around each town and village.

When I die,

bury me in a dragon hillfort,

so that the dragon hillforts around our Ukraine

grow taller by the thickness of the sheet of paper

on which this poem was written.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Svetlana Lavochkina

I Pick Up My Footprints

I know that from here you cannot escape by plane –

you have to be able to fly on your own.

Cats in the house, so many cats,

gathered from the whole neighborhood

(how did they catch a whiff of my departure?)

not our cats but feral cats,

although there is no such a thing as a cat gone wild.

Cats as a warning and threat to my flight

as a bird,

they notice a red spot on my chest

like a linnet’s,

so I’m forced to take flight in the form of a dandelion seed:

I leave the house in search of wide open spaces,

past my garden and into the street

and float toward

a direction very remote –

now the wind gusts will

carry me away, away!

Translated from the Ukrainian by Svetlana Lavochkina

Vasyl Holoborodko is a living classic, a National Shevchenko Award winner and the pioneer of blank verse in Ukrainian poetry. His work is strongly influenced by Ukrainian folklore and symbolism.

Born and educated in Eastern Ukraine, Svetlana Lavochkina (Gitin) is a poet, novelist and translator of Ukrainian and Russian poetry. She was the prize-winner in the Paris Literary Prize 2013 and Tibor and Jones Pageturner Prize London, 2015. Svetlana currently lives in Germany with her husband and two sons.