A belated happy spring, with little beaky alien-tulips from the yard, pushing up their hungry waxy leaf-mouths to the sun.
I saw Paris to Kyiv perform at the Citadel last weekend. Alexis Kochan's voice was so gorgeous -- warm, with both kindness & urgency. Between songs, she read a little snippet of a poem by Oleh Lysheha, which made me very very happy, since I really love his work. She read an excerpt from Swan, which I found translated here (by Lysheha & James Bradfield):
...At last I entered your bright museum
Over the river channel
Just to get warm. The cold rain
Seemed not to stop,
And no one was there . .
But in the corner, under glass
A pair of tall boots was drying
After lying idle somewhere
In a peat bog or a swamp . .
The feet that owned them
Are stones now
Under rippled laces,
With sharpened toes . .
I couldn’t stop staring . .
[...]
Does anyone believe
I have been there? . .
That my feet felt so comfortable
In those shoes? . .
And Alexis said that's how she feels when she hears the old old songs, & I know exactly what she means. Especially when the seasons are changing, fall & very much the spring -- the dark crumbling earth & the shiny white bone-trees of the weeping birches, the wind tasting like dust & light.
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