By Taciana Niadbaj
Translation: John Farndon, Jenya Mironava
***
How the light lies down softly
On this darkness,
How can that which was not
Be forgotten?
You and I are like animals
From an immeasurable age,
We strive
To bring the world back under our wing.
If someday you would wrap me with cross-melodies
Of victorious words, like a coverlet of dreams,
From the chasm of the unforgotten, the unimaginable,
From the caverns of the fakes and the subterranean trunks.
After all, you will send no-one to the stake,
Nor the circles of hell you survived
Until the magi arrived,
And the herald angels
Bore witness to how we lived in the dark.
(2020-2023)
Detained and released without report
Good it was just three days, not a fine
Good there was no beating
Good it was a fine, not 24 hours
Good it was 24 hours, but at least with a mattress
Good it was 15 days, but not 30
Good there was no beating
Good it was straight 90 days, not criminal
Good it was a criminal case, no beatings
Good it was home chemistry, not chemistry [1]
Good it was chemistry, not years in prison
Good it was 2 or 3 years, not ten
Good it was in SIZA [2], not in a colony
Good it was a colony of the general regime, not the intensified [3]
Good there were letters, though it was the intensified
Good it was in a colony, not in PKT [4]
Good it was in PKT, not in ŠYZA [5]
Good it was in ŠYZA, but healthy
Beaten up, but at least healthy
Good if that he got out, now planning treatment
Still in prison, but at least alive
I pray only that he gets out alive
[1] Chemistry” ~ a common sentence: imprisonment (restricted freedom) in an open-type correctional facility + hard labour. “Home chemistry” – when the sentence includes the wording „without being sent to an open-type correctional facility.“ Your freedom is still restricted and you still have to do hard labor, but you are at home, although under police watch.
[2] SIZA – an infamous abbreviation for a “pretrial detention center,” where one is imprisoned while investigation goes on.
[3] Corrective colony regimes are categorized as very strict/special, strict, general, and open” but according to Radio Svaboda, there are colonies of “general, intensified, and strict regime” in Belarus.
[4] PKT, an abbreviation for a “cell-type space/room/premises/ward.” This is usually a space in a colony where one is sent for violating internal order, rules. One can be kept there for up to 6 months.
[5] ŠYZA, an abbreviation for “fine/penalty + isolator/isolation ward.” ~ “punitive confinement, This is more intense/severe than PKT.
***
Of grey steel was the sky
The sky flowed on into fall
We did not rise, you and I,
When they had to, all.
You and I held on firmly here
To September and hopes, ever,
When like a spiderweb from afar
Songs came drifting over –
Songs of despair and of victories,
Of courage and of resistance,
As a band of foreign deities
Whispered magic from the distance.
And we laid low and tried to hear
The sea’s wash and the leaves rustling –
With a seashell held to the ear,
And never an inch of yielding.
***
Wherever I might wake up and wherever I fall asleep –
My Belarus is with me, the most loyal of my team,
That which gives me life, that which shows the way,
And that which, like life, hurts, and cannot be treated.
There’s no other rivers in the world – the Dzvina only,
And the Palata – flowing from long centuries ago.
Betrayals and guilt, youth and love, and poetry:
The abyss measured by the level of the flow.
Polatsak – a city-topos, an axis and a ghost,
The measure of all maps, spaces and mazes.
The city tells you always: rise up; not all is lost –
Unbowed, even when destroyed to blazes.
War only war, a bottomless pit – and on your homeland again,
Like a birthmark, bitter defeat still showing.
Pulling away from – despair, insults, pain.
And beating off – those reflections from a distorting
Mirror that will unravel to night’s refrain.
The last battle is with yourself, when like a fairy tale ending,
Good will conquer evil and give the keys to the domain
To those with who you’ll feel together again.
***
Warmth has returned to Belarus,
But not we.
Our age and passion is steeped in wine, guilty,
We have solidified between epochs and extent.
Another’s life, with or without hospitality
Will not fill us – like water, like wind, passing quickly.
But our own life’s roots do not reach earth’s fundament.
We sway in the breeze, and the changing wind rose
Draws our blood with each thorn – in it goes,
Passing right through, like a bad dream, without satisfying.
Hold a hand out to the border and hold a hand out
To those you have not yet lost to the breeze,
And remember the names – of those who set off for the distance,
Who like hard-to-catch midges become a measure of actions,
Whose stubborn endurance and strength brings people together,
Those who you talk to and those you cry for at night.
Like someone close, yet neither in line nor in sight,
But, because of this, whose voice is simply only louder,
Marking the timetable with the prison bowls set.
But summer flows through fingers, and butterflies
Land on photographs – of your hand and his,
As long as butterflies are not deemed extremists yet.
***
say it again to me: everything will be fine
say it again
a single word won’t transform hell
into a paradise refrain
but the terrain has not crushed us yet
it’s not a plain yet
indulge my weaknesses and these important words
say them again
though I hear the angels‘ trumpets
beyond the wall,
their song will be satisfied by wine-red guilt after all
coming out from the shore of my paranoia’s call
while we rake dung to the music of harps enthralled
and it’s nothing: let there be arias
beyond the wall
and meanwhile I gaze into the dark well silently
see the abyss, and do not cross the boundary
divine and cross myself, then divine repeatedly
for the essence thanking the dregs and the illusory
everything will be as you say, but without us
or we will not be we
there’ll be fresh air and prisoners will gain liberty
they’ll rifle through volumes of the unlived, stolen from the library
and we’ll go home, lie down and dream good dreams easily.