“Iryna Shuvalova’s poem is a signal response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it is not bound by literal facts. The insistent call to ‘go and don’t come back’ starts with literal loss, but it leads quickly to larger dimensions, to mythic and even apocalyptic dimensions of the end of a world, the world, through the title. Uilleam Blacker’s translation eschews punctuation and capitalization and signals another kind of ending of norms.” —Arthur Sze
go escape while you can go escape
buy tickets for the last water train
which as it subsides reveals
curbs pavements the riverside
the anatomy of the sinewy city that lies
naked and unfamiliar like a man in your bed
go—escape while you can
take all your belongings
everything that’s yours
split lips cut knees
the cracked jar of a head from which
memory slowly seeps and all you can
leave just leave behind
the evening lights in the windows
the beloved exposed throat of the sky
the smell of the subway the lead of the river
go and don’t come back have no doubts that’s how it is
to fall into the bottomless well of a body
to throw yourself like a comb over your shoulder
to sow yourself across a field so that a host
of warriors might grow
this is how the needle passes
through the needle’s eye this is how the forest
shall come up to the walls
and start to tremble
From “Кінечні Пісні.” Copyright © Iryna Shuvalova. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2023 by Uilleam Blacker. All rights reserved.
