Thursday
Yesterday was Ukraine’s Independence Day, first held in 1991 to celebrate the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. I have experience with such independence days, having had my 15 minutes of fame when I appeared on national television during Slovenia’s 1994 celebration of V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day), commemorating the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany. But Slovenia was really celebrating its independence from Yugoslavia, just as Ukraine yesterday celebrated Vladimir Putin’s failure to subjugate the country in 2022. The battle, of course, is still ongoing and, while things look promising for Ukraine, there’s a lot of suffering and bloodshed ahead..
To mark the occasion, I am sharing a poem by Katie Ferris, who is the partner of Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, whom I have cited in the past. For Ferris, who is battling cancer, “burning world” may refer to her radiation treatment, but it’s also allude to Russia’s artillery attacks on Ukrainian cities. In any event, her poem focuses on how to respond when one finds oneself “in the midst of hell.”
The key, she says, is to stand in the interstices between that which is hell and that which isn’t—between a bald and cancerous body and a body that is still beautiful. It’s as though (to use her metaphor) there’s a loose step to the front porch but the house is still standing. And in this house there’s a door open between hell and “what isn’t hell” that one is propping open. One “stand[s]/ within its wedge/ a shield.”
That’s why one offers poems of love to a burning world.
Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
To train myself to find, in the midst of hell
what isn’t hell.The body, bald, cancerous, but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.