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.
Interview: http://strayshot.blogspot.com/2008/04/interview-with-valzhyna-mort.html
Video animation of her poem "New York" from PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/uwm/mort.html
Yes, Layli! You can see why I still remember it 4 years later!
Holy! This gave me chills too. Good one Khadijah!