‘You hang onto nothing, girls, that’s what I’m gonna teach you’,
Nan used to say, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
She looked like a vampire or some other undead creature.
Officially, she was Halya, but everyone called her Greta.
Walking a tightrope in a circus used to be how she’d earn her pay.
She kept living her life as if she were still in the spotlight.
‘You hang onto nothing, nada, the hole of a doughnut’, she’d say.
‘That’s what working at that Soviet circus has taught me.
‘You hang onto nothing, and you carefully feel with your toes
for something to stand on. It’d be narrow and painfully small.
Mind my words, girls: the day when this whole damn world goes,
what you’re gonna be left with, you see, is nothing at all.’
She would blow out a cloud of smoke that made everyone choke,
her lipstick a shade of red arrestingly bright.
Each of her three granddaughters was strong and thin as a spoke,
just right to be walking the tightrope at a dizzying height.
And so they keep hanging on, their fingers all stiff and sore,
as the enemy burns their entire lives to the ground.
They cling to the nothingness that was a home, a whole town before,
until that narrow and painfully small thing to stand on is found.
Translated by Aliona Vitiaz from: Maryna Ponomarenko. Книжка любові і люті (Book of Love and Fury) (Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva, 2023), p. 50.
Original online: https://litcentr.in.ua/publ/279-1-0-17677
