Dancing in Odessa

Posted on: 3 November 2015 by Ilya Kaminsky in Creative Writing

The Centre for New and International invited three major American poets, Carolyn Forché, Brian Turner and Ilya Kaminsky to read from work on the theme of poetry and conflict. This event was co-sponsored by the Poetry Society and formed part of the University's Festival of Ideas commemoration of World War I.

Dancing in Odessa

We lived north of the future, days opened
letters with a child’s signature, a raspberry, a page of sky.

My grandmother threw tomatoes
from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket
over my head. I painted
my mother’s face. She understood
loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans.

The night undressed us (I counted
its pulse) my mother danced, she filled the past
with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his
    granddaughter
touched my eyelid – I kissed

the back of her knee. The city trembled,
a ghost-ship setting sail.
And my classmate invented twenty names for Jew.
He was an angel, he had no name,
we wrestled, yes. My grandfathers fought

the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full
of Brodsky’s poems. The city trembled,
a ghost-ship setting sail.
At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.
We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.

At the local factory, my father
took a handful of snow, put it in my mouth.
The sun began a routine narration,

whitening their bodies: mother, father dancing, moving
as the darkness spoke behind them.
It was April. The sun washed the balconies, April.

I retell the story the light etches
into my hand: Little book, go to the city without me.

from Dancing in Odessa (Arc Publications, 2014)