***
a frozen sea of people rolls stones around its mouth
this dead language of a time we’ll turn to
when the wind cuts life’s thread like a flower
and weaves it into a long night of forgetting
the dead say: we sought homes like light
but couldn’t find them, and the earth seated us at its table,
and now each day we eat the dirty music of silence
dark flashes of memory passing from mouth to mouth
the dead say: fighting for memory is for the living
while we grasp gravestone inscriptions
like trees grasping air with dried up roots
though they sting children’s palms like snakes
the dead say: everything we knew has grown strange
our streets have followed us underground
and now we can’t leave history’s ghetto
for our past is dead, poisonous water
the dead say: the living drink hope from our bones but
we lost the seeds of hope along the way they stick tall
in our throats and hide their eyes like the heavy stones
the living hold under their tongues
Translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk from: Iya Kiva, «перекочує в роті каміння застигле море людей…» Posestry, 25 (2022).
Copyright © 2026 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reproduced by permission from the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.
A version of this poem will appear in the bilingual edition: Iya Kiva, Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters, trans. by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, forthcoming in 2026).
