Dzvinia Orlowsky

Stone Cross

— after Vasyl Stefanyk (1871-1936) Ukrainian prose writer, political activist

1.

Remember your village of always uphill,
a water-warped leather neck-strap,
the cramped wagon with an oak shaft.

Remember dirt, hunks of manure
flecked with feather and bone,
dust settled on the road before sunrise—

your horse hitched to your nearside—
you, a saint, tied to a breast collar of rope,
forever carrying light on your back.

Bulging veins, engirded chains of blue steel,
your forehead swelled—
human sweat, animal sweat.

2.

If a thistle penetrates your foot—so what?

Blessed is that washed with saliva.
Blessed is the pinch of salt
buried in a wake of hoofs.

3.

Remember it for its silence

the hill where you staked
your life—stacked stones
into a cross, carved your name

into its old silt surface,
tiny phosphorous stars­—

You knew no other marriage,
no other stony eyes.

4.

Cup your hands—
press them to your lips:

at times a deep-water wave uproots
a rock and washes it ashore, it remains
lying there heavy and inert.

From the rising and setting sun
it beholds the lively water and grieves that it no longer
bears its burden—

Author: Dzvinia Orlowsky

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a founding editor of Four Way Books, translator, and author of seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including A Handful of Bees, reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series; Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry; and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Book’s Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize selected by Robert Pinsky. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s and Halyna Kruk’s poetry have been short-listed, respectively, for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2025 PEN American Literary Award in Translation.  Their co-translation from the Ukrainian of Oleksander Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna, is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2026.  www.dzviniaorlowsky.com

Plume: Issue #68 March 2017