SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Fourteen
LILIA BOMKO
Sirens
I am unable to write when blaring sirens
storm my house from all sides,
so I flee to my soul's vault
and search for words that can come to someone's
rescue – the same search as for writing poetry –
to fill the hollows of flesh wounds.
If my words have no practical meaning, if they are
powerless to save anyone from death,
as they aren't tourniquets,
or bandages, or sterile gauze, –
what is a word then?
The one that keeps being born
and never dies?
Even when a cloud of smoke
and dust rises over the city,
and the next day they
clear away the rubble,
Mary is in the basement,
sobbing in prayer
to the frozen ground,
her words reaching
the stained glass windows of heaven
where our souls, like dawn
amid the winter darkness,
have found their Milky Way.
Autumn
the chipped sun of an autumn day
its gilded chrysanthemum eyes
watch yellowed leaves drop
onto the scrapheap of time
A Serenade of Tenderness
Our palms are skating rinks
in the stone city
where the first snow always melts
in triads of incessant anxiety.
In this city, only tenderness
can't perish underneath
asphalt leaves
that drown in raindrops.
This is the way December approaches
tears get warmer
with every passing day
under the robe of solitude.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Lilia Bomko was born in the Ternopil Region and now lives in Lviv. A poet, a visual artist and a literary critic, she teaches the Ukrainian literature at the Ivan Franko National University, Lviv, and researches into ancient literature. She also works as an editor for the publishing house of the Ukrainian Catholic University. Her poems appear in magazines and almanacs, including Mint, New Prose, The Bell, Sivach, Sisters, Young Voices, and Europski glasnik (Croatia), and were also published in translation into Spanish and Croatian. They were included in the anthology of contemporary Ukrainian war poetry entitled In principio erat Verbum and in Ukraine 2022: Poetic Chronicle of the War, the Croatian anthology of Ukrainian poetry about the war.
