Poetry for Every Day of the Year: National Theatre Talks to the People of Ukraine (2023) 100% 1★

– The following are words from a Ukrainan actress who is volunteering in the Donbass region; her name is Yaryna Gordienko, she's a friend of Dária here. Yaryna has lost her boyfriend in the war; he fought in the east and went missing, now no one knows where he is. Yaryna is waiting for him; she believes that he will be found. „Life before the war. What is it? I honestly don't remember. I think I was born on February the 24. And immediately into battle. Every day the war lives in me. Trips to Donbass, boxes, communication on the phone, communication with the military, threats from the Russians, these are all separate worlds. And I don't know how much more they can be carried and contained. I don't know how many more Ukrainians will die. I don't want us to carry this cemetery inside us, but I want us to carry flowers inside us. Now I continue to help many soldiers, while I do not know for sure where my beloved is. I have lost touch with him, and we are separated only by the front line. Everything continues to be very painful. I'm often on edge. I can't stop, because at this moment I seem to be slowly entering the dead zone. Therefore, I continue to be a phoenix. That's why I keep running. My name is Yaryna. And now I'm a volunteer. I'm 28. And at 28, I want to live more than at 20. Now it's 23:34 and I am in Donbass; I spend the night with our soldiers, warm myself in a sleeping bag, and write this text. The body is extremely tired, but in the heart there is great love and faith that it is not in vain.”

Don Paterson: Rain

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one big thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a starlit gutter, running gold
with the neon drugstore sign
and I'd read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain's own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

Derek Walcott: Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Warsan Shire: Home

No one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
sayingleave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here