RICHARD BERENGARTEN - POEM FOR UKRAINE'S Olesya Zdorovetska
Richard Berengarten, one of Cambridge’s most influential poets, writes
“ I wrote this poem in 2020, immediately after hearing Olesya’s extraordinary and beautiful renderings of poems by ten Ukrainian poets. All these moving poems in Ukrainian take on far huger areas of implication and resonate into vaster depths of meaningfulness – even including prophecy – when they’re read and heard through Olesya’s voice, across the black light of Putin’s 2022 invasion.
On hearing Olesya Zdorovetska singing her settings to Ukrainian poems
Once this singing starts it somehow never
stops even when all the lights go off
and clouds cover the entire sky.
This is a kind of singing not picked up by them
but only by you or me – or you and me.
This is a singing you might hear in dreams.
It might well waken the unpitied dead
stretching out helpless hands to be redeemed
and – in the feather-breadth of one unbreathed
unbidden instant – make them break out in smiles.
Cambridge, 30 October 2020
I do hope readers will use my small poem as a gateway to Olesya’s unique singing. A voice like hers is an embodiment and witness of life itself and a guardian of our futurity. Out of pain, despair, tragedy and death, her singing breeds strength, courage, hope and life – as do all the Ukrainian poems she transmutes into song.
