Tempo

Oksana Maksymchuk
| poetry

 

What I didn’t suspect about
war is that there’d be
music

Not the kind that compels you to move
in harmonious discord
with the others

Nor the kind that creates a burning
in the loins to mix breath
with breath

But the kind that irradiates
every surviving nucleus
rendering you a creature

absolutely new
facing the passage of time
naked and unashamed

In the intervals between
war and worse, we discern the score
ready to whir with

planets and stars that coil
around our fragile core
orderly and composed

like a tragic chorus

Oksana Maksymchuk is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in the Ukrainian. Her English-language poems appeared in AGNIThe Irish TimesThe Paris ReviewThe Poetry Review, and many other journals. She co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an award-winning anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry.

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