History of Literature
Today, Russian army Bombed out My university
That’s where I studied History of Russian literature Scary Mystical Cruel
What do you see When they speak About Russian literature?
A child’s teardrop? King Herod? Flying Margarita? A glove off the left hand?
Russian literature
I close my eyes I see My Burnt University
Every new day Brings new pain Kharkiv hurts today Following Chernihiv Mariupol Okhtyrka A fragment lodged deep down Kyiv? Chernobyl?
I raise my eyes An airplane in the sky
Carries A bomb.
Beréski
In our living room In Kharkiv There were birch trees on the wallpaper Mom referred to As the birch grove
We were not Vatniks There was no Such word back then But I miss My f**** birch trees
I miss them dearly
My abandoned city Was calling for me
I was forgetting Streets Houses The theater ziggurat
Then it started to disappear I’ve found out The city is being bombed The city is on fire
The color of my guilt Black letters of Russian Cyrillic
These words in a column They held my world up The fragile portico Of articulated caryatids The eternal themes The world has curled up in a scroll It flies It flies It flies And so do we with everyone else
I asked you, “Will we be able to write after Auschwitz?”
“In the time of.”
Translated by Galina Andreevskaya