Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

When I was fifteen I spent a month in Kaniv, Ukraine, a river port city on the bank of the Dnieper River. As I work on this episode, the once peaceful city is threatened by Russian forces as it is an important river port city and home to a hydroelectric plant. Like many, I am struggling with the images of war. I cannot look and yet this tragedy feels important to witness.

I was so young when I was there. So much of it is a blur. But I remember the people, the kindness, the warmth. In my host family, I was teased for how often I said ”Dyakuyu” (thank you in Ukrainian). I loved the food, ate every morsel and probably, unknowingly, ate more than I should have of their precious summer provisions. I was welcomed in Kaniv, walking freely along the river with other young women, all of us posing and smiling for my camera, laughing and dancing to techno songs under lights along the river bank.

I also remember the homage paid to the poet Taras Shevchenko, the monument to the great Ukrainian poet of the 18-40’s, who was punished by exile and forced into military service for writing poems that spoke out against Russian oppression. Language felt important in Ukraine. And it has for generations. As the poet Ilya Kaminsky writes: Is language a place you can leave? Is language a wall you can cross? What is on the other side of that wall?

In today’s poem, we see how the images of violence live on and repeat through generations, and how language and translation continue to be the key to our greater understanding.

Burning Duplex
by Janiru Liyanage

	           after Jericho Brown

The story doesn’t translate
My father sends a Facebook video of a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk setting himself alight

      I watch as the monk’s face pixelates to stone; as his hands lift like heavy bowls of light
      In one version, the match is only a metaphor for a wing & not its slick throat of wood & sulphur

In another, the world is nothing but dead & heat & what is grace if not this faithful ruin; if not spark spun & sulphur
Last night, I dreamt a field slaughtered in music; found a nocturne of brown boys, alive & circling the water in loops

      Last night, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up, licking the shine clean from my knuckles, & kept the video on loop
      I filled with grief the way the dead deer filled with the wild– inside this forest, I made a tidy butcher of all its ghost

Inside this boat, in its sacred language of hunger & limb, the only word I can say is ghost
Look, how every stupid metaphor hangs our guilt, gilded between us like a moon

      Look, how gently the torched monk walked. How cruel a son I’ve been– yes, I poured the fuel; I sung the moon
      & at the customs office, my father doesn’t understand what the border patrol agent is saying

& I keep quiet. At the mirror, he works at his jaw– its softness & new english like clay: Say red, say smoke; say
red relentless smoke; say I know, I get it: this story will never translate

"Burning Duplex" by Janiru Liyanage. Used by permission of the poet.