Taras’s Dreams

^{translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin}

Shifting and uncertain, like primordial pain—
naked, distorted by the passing years,
belonging to no one—they fly among
the stars. Through the labor of childbirth,
into the new world, on white sheets
children come forth, and from there,
from those white sheets pain echoes,
the vivid and sharp cry of a woman in labor—
there where all is pitch dark,
where all is eternity and primordial cold,
and where you can’t see how Chernecha Hill
untwined Ukraine’s light brown braids.
Where the immense Lethe’s black waters rush,
where the Milky Way stretches without Chumaks—
dreams wander, these stepchildren of the ages,
these homeless orphans of the Poet.
They wander. There is the Milky Way.
And there, an alien land. An endless black night.
They’re out there. When I fall asleep,
they are in my head.