Letters
Viktor Nedostup
Viktor Nedostup
Waiting for nocturne
Kyiv – the champion!
Kyiv – the champion!
The clouds crawl like burning ice floes
the streets are brimming with gold and wind
doors rattle neons tremble
frost bitumen anxiety
ladies are sharp like silver strings
they take trolleys they flag taxis
the sun is setting and its angle of incidence
is somewhat like a B flat note
bohunks in the sub are croaking predictions
led by a full fed elephant
deerskins coats phonemes phonemes
cracked and coarse like moonshine
and my teeth are like a r-r-r-radiator
phonemes stick the portraits of stars
thirty-years-old queens like a chapeau claque
deflate to the size of unhappy women
but the smile is needless the sun is buried
a cripple stumbles across a lonely square
throws up his head and watches
light raging in the hundred thousandth cup
young and deceived with a baby in her arms
returns to her mother to Stary Oskol
a fiery explosion wakes the baby
a hundred thousand voices in one ‘goal’
a hundred thousand happies on the street
fall in cafes fall flowing into the sub
and black cuts the city in twain
unable to freeze groans the Dnipro.
Nocturne I
In winter in the night
something wakes me up
something holds me by the throat
I cannot breathe
I hate walls
I walk along naked dark streets
I look for the sun
my frozen lips try to remember something
a song or a name
there is no name to that
there is no way out
it’s Kyiv
perhaps my friends are not asleep
it’s Kyiv thank Heaven.
I ease off at Podil.
I’m sorry. I feel,
by Heavens, much better now.
(Yurko Pozaiak, Viktor Nedostup, Semen Lybon. The Lost Letter: Poems. Kyiv: Liuta Sprava, 2019, p. 71, 73.)