Valzhyna Mort - "Belarusian I"

When I heard Valzhyna Mort read this poem at the Austin International Poetry Festival in 2007 I got chills, and four years later, I still feel the same effect. Aside from the riveting emotional and visual power of the poem, and the layered-in metaphor for the struggle to preserve her native language, she manages to capture the vulnerability of children trapped in impossible (adult-created) circumstances with a relentless gaze. And within that, the poem shares an explicit knowledge of children's precocity and potential to transform all of our futures which in turn implicates us all in their suffering. 

BELARUSIAN I



even our mothers have no idea how we were born


how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world


the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing


we couldn't tell which of us was a girl or a boy


we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread


and our future


a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon


was performing there 
at the highest pitch


bitch



we grew up in a country where


first your door is stroked with chalk

then at dark a chariot arrives


and no one sees you any more


but riding in those cars were neither


armed men nor


a wanderer with a scythe


this is how love loved to visit us

and snatch us veiled



completely free only in public toilets


where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing


we fought the summer heat the winter snow


when we discovered we ourselves were the language


and our tongues were removed we started talking with


our eyes


when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands


when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes


when we were shot in the legs we nodded our head for yes


and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads 


alive


we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers


as if into bomb shelters


to be born again



and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future


was leaping through the fiery hoop


of the sun



—from Factory of Tears, tr. the author with Franz Wright and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

Valzhyna Mort from Laura Hope-Gill on Vimeo.