Dzvinia Orlowsky

The Village Crow
November 18, 2020 Orlowsky Dzvinia

The Village Crow

The village crow knew everything—
whose sons fathered partisans,

guns like large broken wishbones
pressed to their chests,

which rooster lied,
confused death with rising,

which neighbor’s
hatchet would outlive him—

Water is the enemy!
Some claimed the crow was older

than the oldest oak.  Others swore
it was brought by the devil, one year,

to interpret the great war,
sleepwalkers and arsonists.

No one cared about angels anymore.
The crow had special tricks:

Before a hunter could lift his rifle
and blast the bird into a comet of feathers,

it could bring down enough rain
to rot the hay.  When it cawed,

the lake grew quiet,
clouds darkened the sky

covering the water’s surface.
Fish guessed their days were numbered,

hiding among swampy drapes.
But even a fisherman before casting his line

removed his hat and cried out in disbelief:
Does anyone recognize me?

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