Valzhyna Mort

Born into countries enveloped in war and chaos, poets find ways to tell their stories to the outside world.

Here is a poem by Valzhyna Mort, poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus.

She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by The New York Times and The NPR, and also winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize.

Mort teaches at Cornell University and writes in English and Belarusian. She translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish.

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 tread 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 anymore.
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 that 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 heads 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 to 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.

 --Valzhyna Mort

 [translated from Belarusian by the author, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright]

[Poem from: “Poems From The Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages”, Edited by Chris McCabe (Chambers, 2019)