you shouldn’t fight back
that is outdated
say the neighbors to her
those to whom to get closer
she tried
You shall
don’t moan
and certainly not
howl
while you bleed
This is outrageous archaism
moreover unaesthetic —
they say,
from whom she expected help.
May be
clever:
let you
nice smiling
tear into pieces
and forget everything
that’s what we would do
if we were you
secure,
certainly.
As early as the 1990s, Halyna Petrosanyak belonged to a group of artists who, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union in Ivano Frankivsk, addressed the polyphonic, multi-ethnic past of their hometown. Today she lives in Switzerland. This poem (translated from the Ukrainian by Maria Weissenböck) comes from the volume “Exophonien”, which has just been published by Verlag Der Gesund Menschenverstand, Lucerne (96 pages, 17 euros). From this Petrosanyak reads on March 10, in the Munich poetry cabinet.