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Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, screenwriter, playwright, born 1985 in Pervomaisk Luhanska oblast, and currently living in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Like Fashion (2009) and Apricots of Donbas (2015), which is about people surviving a war. Like Fashion received three of Ukraine’s most prestigious awards for young poets. Apricots of the Donbas received the International Poetic Award of the Kovalev Foundation (New York, USA). In 2015 Kyiv’s New Time magazine listed Yakimchuk among the one hundred most influential people in the arts in Ukraine. She has also authored two film scripts and two plays. Her new play The Wall was produced at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre. Her poems have been translating into roughly twenty languages, including English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Swedish and Hebrew.
From APRICOTS OF THE DONBAS
(a long poem)
Where no more apricots grow,
Russia starts.
THE COALFACE
with eyes sea blue
and hair flaxen yellow
faded a little
it’s not a flag
it’s my father
standing in a flooded mine
water up to his knees
my father
his face, like coal –
with a print
of an antediluvian field horsetail
trampled by years
the sea hardens into salt
the grass hardens into coal
and father turns like feather grass
gray
he’s a man
and men don’t cry –
so the saying goes
his cheeks are trenches
chopped up by the mine
and the coal
from my Father’s face
burned in Donbas bonfires
and ovens
and somewhere high up
there stands a terricone
the terricone snarling
like a dragonlLike a sphinx
defending its Tutankhamun
and it’s only me who knows
that the pit heap in the middle of the steppe
is nothing but caps from the bottles
that Dad drank
and ashes of the cigarettes
that Dad smoked
Translated from the Ukrainian by
Svetlana Lavochkin