
Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky – Recipient of the 2021 Carnegie “Great Immigrant Awards”. Photo Credit: Carnegie Corporation of New York
In a Time of Peace
Inhabitant of earth for forty something years
I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open
their phones to watch
a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When a man reaches for his wallet, the cop
shoots. Into the car window. Shoots.
It is a peaceful country.
We pocket our phones and go.
To the dentist,
to buy shampoo,
pick up the children from school,
get basil.
Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement
for hours.
We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.
We watch. Watch
others watch.
The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy.
It is a peaceful country.
And it clips our citizens’ bodies
effortlessly, the way the President’s wife trims her toenails.
All of us
still have to do the hard work of dentist appointments,
of remembering to make
a summer salad: basil, tomatoes, it is a joy, tomatoes, add a little salt.
This is a time of peace.
I do not hear gunshots,
but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky
as the avenue spins on its axis.
How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.
Ilya Kaminsky from Deaf Republic, Graywolf Press, 2019
It is not surprising that I am featuring a poem in this blog post by Ilya Kaminsky, the celebrated Ukrainian American poet and Bourne Chair of Poetry at Georgia Tech, Not just because he has close ties to the Ukraine and is naturally outraged by Putin’s invasion but because of his 2019 book, Deaf Republic, that creates the horrifying “isness” of war in an imagined and un-named Eastern European city under invasion.
In a painful irony it is now, in real life, Ilya’s beloved Ukraine under that attack. But also notice, please, how Ilya tries to balance in his poem above and and in his life, a critical eye on our cultural and violent shadows with a lyric expression of love for this world. Please see, his three paragraph article below for how he explains the importance of this balance. Yes: How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.
In my review of Ilya’s Deaf Republic I noted that the poems of war in an imagined country were book-ended by two poems set away from there, most likely in what is now Ilya’s home country, the United States. These two poems, We Lived Happily During the War and In a Time of Peace (featured above) feel like a call to arms. Not physical arms like guns and bombs but a call to arms metaphorically against complacency. About the need for us here in the West to really wake up to the perils not just overseas but at home. To hear Ilya in a March 2nd interview, talk about his poem We lived Happily During the War and his personal reflections on the war in Ukraine please click here.