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 AGNI, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review, and many other journals. She co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an award-winning anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry.