Iya Kiva is a poet, translator and journalist, member of Pen Ukraine. She was born in 1984 in Donetsk, because of the Russian-Ukrainian war she as a refugee moved to Kyiv in 2014. Kiva graduated from Donetsk National University (2006, Philology). She is the author of two collections of poetry, Farther from Heaven (2018) and The First Page of Winter (2019), as well as a book of interviews with Belarus writers about the protest of 2020-2021 We will awaken as others: conversations with contemporary Belarus authors about the past, the present, and the future of Belarus (2021).

Her poetry has been translated into 33 world languages. Many of these translations have been included in anthologies published in various countries. The collections of her poems were published as books in translations into Bulgarian (Witness of Namelessness, 2022, translator Denis Olegov) and into Polish (The Black Roses of Time, 2022, translator Aneta Kaminska). Based in Lviv, Ukraine.

Iya Kiva

* * *

we've packed a contraband humanitarian aid kit of war songs     

and shipped it to Europe America India and China

paving the silk road with great Ukrainian literature         

what have you got there, brothers - they ask at the borders -      

silence dressed up in cyrillic letters

the sacred fire of the candlelight letter "ї"  

our and your freedom to rest in a land of love       

like the broken trees of distant memory     

what have you got there, brothers, - ask our dead -          

the history of a tribe with a dirty rag in its mouth 

rotting chests filled with grandparents' and great-grandparents' lives     

which we've carried for centuries as if shouldering the Carpathians

what have you got there, brothers,  - ask our living -       

cloths embroidered with military chronicles and stretched-out sweaters of wrath

sloppy sketches mapping the new Europe  

children's dust-jackets for future books      

what have you got there, brothers - ask our mirrors -

copper coins of breath in our ripped pockets

the disquiet of air in the broken frames of our mouths

the pulsing streaks of time in our red eyes

16.03.22

Translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk