- translated by Richard Coombes
- russian text: https://kopilkapoetry.org/?p=727
we, who on the back of others’ adversity
made good, not coping with the devil back home,
each a twenty kilo allowance but barefoot,
reeking of the distillation of our shame,
planted out into a different furrow
but evidencing neither roots nor shoots –
here we lie beneath our screen of smoke
not knowing who we are or where we’re going
of course it’s not as if we’re really here
in Anatolia or the Promised Land –
Liss, more like, or Zurbagan, Shvambrania,
rediscovering faltering first steps
guardsmen with no country and no king
and not the slightest swash of D’Artagnan’s buckle
we’re catching our Nord-Ost back-to-back
drowned in the tidal wave of ’22
to the shouts of muezzins, to Shabbat songs
in the lights of evening in the daytime languor
in Singapore, all lemon and banana,
in purgatory, Shanghai, in Brighton Beach,
wherever we’re taken by our native speech
our irreproachable, unexchangeable Russian
tongue — can’t buy a thing with it, can’t hide it —
will always reappear as brand and scourge
so here we are, hello, mute brotherhood
shorn of rights to future and nostalgia,
nothing to be proud of! ah, so be it
all hope is gone, and yet she just won’t die
perhaps not us but other versions of us,
now scattered, will find themselves a way to regroup
and put out roots and shoots, grow cobs and ears
wrapped and folded into Russian words
Asia Anistratenko
Assia Anistratenko (b. 1975) is an Irkutsk-born poet, editor, and singer-songwriter. She is the author of three books and multiple journal publications. Assia has received many awards for her songs and poetry. After the invasion of Ukraine, she left Moscow and is now living in Israel.
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