You'll get something back for sure
when so much is taken away.
Something you get, the sudden impression of farewell.
How could you have known how the bird swoops, how the desperate heart just stands still in the midst of time?
Pain.
Pain and hope give you back the sense of the world.
Bringing alive the essence of your being, giving it meaning.
Pain and hope that you didn't expect, that was never mentioned at the dinner table at home.
***
How could you hear the voice of the morning forest
burned by fire, who else could tell you
set the look, tune it,
like a wing so that the eye does not twitch,
when it's on the pitch
spotted the twilight animal?
***
Where you endured, endured
this confused balancing over the winter,
the fears stacked like the books
the paternal library,
how can you curse the burden now
of the coincidence that you in the
cold wind of history?
***
Do not you dare,
don't you dare curse there
where the wounded area bares its teeth,
where those burned by anger do not weep,
framed by light,
pierced by moonlight.
***
Pain and hope unite us in the
craters of the dark sky.
pain and hope, like two lungs of the girl,
that already drowned
but from which green brackish water was pressed,
to save life.
Pain and hope, like smoke, rebuilt
after the fire.
***
Only in this destruction when the past remains
like a shore in the night, only in the noise
nocturnal endurance, dog-like waiting
appears in the corridor the smack of love for that
what made you be with you
in that spring, so understandable, clear,
in the backlight of the sun,
lit in the wind.
***
I looked for sleepy women in the wagon
invisible voices reach out into the corridor like threads.
I saw the fire of fervor die out over the heads of the men.
Children fall into the twilight as if on their mother's breast.
Dogs fall silent at the sight of the sun sweeping over the city.
***
But summer will come
the size of the withered river,
and the boys on the asphalt soccer field,
like letters of the constitution - testify to the equality of the frontier born,
Equality and honesty of those from an early age
used to rubbing the skin on the rough asphalt of the courtyards,
used to pain and hope
those in the light in the cracks in the body
Sew lumps of July sun.
***
it's supposed to be summer
and the trains returning to the city,
like anglers,
shall not come without a catch,
through the railway stations they shall carry our hope –
bitter like smoke
and, like a letter,
bitter...
Translated from the Ukrainian by
Sabine Stöhr
The writer, musician and poet
Serhij Zhadan
received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade this year.