She and I have the same war. I dream my green dream
inside a music box playing walnut thumps.
My friend’s sleep is a busted lockbox in Lviv.
She wakes up, puts lipstick on. Hours later, my turn.
We check the news on our intrepid phones.
We have the same war. Hers flies overhead.
We talk on our computers each week.
Her connection is strong; jokes about war, strong;
Ukraine’s warriors, inventive and — dare I say — strong?
Exhaustion billows between her words,
sends gigabytes of guilt. I cannot fight.
I carry her war in the pockets of my jeans.
The war gives her powerful guilt.
She says she is no warrior, though her work
teaching Ukrainian is combat, an endless tour
of duty. She packs her remorse in a rolling bag,
speaks to it, makes each rare trip
a learning journey about her land.
We had the same war. It visited me,
sniffed my door, made me cry for a year,
worried my son, and left. What did it want?
What do wars always want? Now I must tend
to my words, warring war. O war, no more!
A full-time poetry job. But with nightly rest.
Survivor’s guilt? Synchronized griefs,
twisted like vines. Survivor’s love.
I am a moth flickering at a fogged-up screen —
she, a mouth, the art museum’s pockmarked walls.
We are a torn hammock by the acacia bush,
stray cats, and sand everywhere.
Click here to read Olga Livshin on the origin of the poem.
Image by Surgey Gussev on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Olga Livshin:
I am from Ukraine and feel a deep connection to its land and cultural legacy. Though I grew up in a Russian-speaking environment, I now take Ukrainian lessons online with an instructor who lives in Lviv. She is a wonderful teacher and human, and we have become friends.
Lviv is in western Ukraine, and it is not bombed as often as other cities we hear about in the media. Still, people are wounded and die from Russia’s attacks; many lost a family member who fought at the front. I admire my friend, who is always ready with a joke for some of the darkest events we are living through, but I also worry for her, and for Ukrainians more broadly. It isn’t easy to put up a brave front and carry on with your life in the face of war fatigue.
Poetry is one way to approach what resists ordinary language. As part of the Ukrainian diaspora and a person who has friends living in Ukraine, I am tired of putting on a smile every day. Poetry gives permission to talk about these issues and reflect on one Ukrainian woman who is living through this calamity. Imagery, in particular, provides ways to verbalize the subtle yet real ways in which war is present in my conversations with my friend.
Olga Livshin’s poetry recently appears in Poetry, The Southern Review, and AGNI. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019) and translator of Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).
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