When Russia invaded Ukraine, Amelina set aside most of her writing to document war crimes. Photograph: Daniel Mordzinski |
Poem About a Crow: a work by the killed Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina
Amelina has died, aged 37, from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike in Kramatorsk
Monday 3 July 2023
Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, poet and public intellectual. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of her country in 2022, she set aside most of her writing to document and research war crimes.
Amelina understood the risks she ran with this work, both as a citizen who chose to stay in her country during war, and as a writer facing an invading army bent on destroying Ukrainian national identity.
She moved her son to safety in Poland, but kept returning herself. When Kyiv came under bombardment in early summer she watched the explosions from her apartment and wrote: “The war is when you can no longer follow all news and cry about all neighbours who died instead of you a couple of miles away. Still, I want to not forget to learn the names.”
She died on 1 July, aged 37, from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant in the eastern town of Kramatorsk.
Two weeks before she died, she wrote about a painter, Polina Rayko, whose work had been largely obliterated in the floods unleashed by the collapse of the Kakhovka dam: “Art lives as long as the world sees it.”
Below is Poem About a Crow, inspired by her work interviewing women who lived through Russian occupation. Translated by Uilleam Blacker.
Poem About a Crow
In a barren springtime field
Stands a woman dressed in black
Crying her sisters’ names
Like a bird in the empty sky
She’ll cry them all out of herself
The one that flew away too soon
The one that had begged to die
The one that couldn’t stop death
The one that has not stopped waiting
The one that has not stopped believing
The one that still grieves in silence
She’ll cry them all into the ground
As though sowing the field with pain
And from pain and the names of women
Her new sisters will grow from the earth
And again will sing joyfully of life
But what about her, the crow?
She will stay in this field forever
Because only this cry of hers
Holds all those swallows in the air
Do you hear how she calls
Each one by her name?
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