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Every night I hear planes
Flying over our house
I count them like sheep
One, bringing death to a village
Two, bringing death to a city
Three, bringing food for the soldiers
Who will finish the job
Four, bringing back the bodies
Every night I hear planes
Flying over our house
They hum like a swarm of bees
One, making a U-turn
Two, heading back at high speed
Three, what if this one is coming after us
Four, aren’t they all
Every night I hear planes
Flying over our house
I asked around, no one else is bothered
Every night I hear planes
Flying over our house
Not once they woke up my child
Smiling in her sleep
Every night I hear planes
Every day I hear planes
I shout over them
What I can’t whisper into your ear
ГРУЗ
Каждое утро летит самолётик:
Закрывай глазки, открывай ротик.
Каждую ночь летит самолёт
Горе в чужую деревню несёт.
Будем считать их, будто овечек.
Был человечек — нет человечка.
В гонке за смертью — только вперёд.
Раз самолёт, два самолёт.
Видишь, кружатся три и четыре?
Вспомни, что нам говорили о мире.
Пять самолёт, шесть самолёт.
Мёртвых обратно никто не везёт.
Зайке не слышно мотора, он спит.
Над ним самолётик, как пчёлка, жжужит.
Каждое утро и каждую ночь —
То сына, то дочь.
То сына, то дочь.
Both versions are the author’s. The English version was first published in Poetry for Peace, an online anti-war campaign launched by Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality. The Russian version is published for the first time.
Polina Cosgrave is a bilingual poet based in Ireland. Her debut collection “My Name Is” was published by Dedalus Press in 2020. She is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Literature Bursary Award for 2021. Polina is featured in the Forward Prizes Book of Poetry 2022 (UK).
Launched in 2012, “Four Centuries” is an international electronic magazine of Russian poetry in translation.
Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was one of the most prolific Russian writers of the twentieth century. Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya, is a representative selection of Ehrenburg’s poetry, available in English for the first time.
Young readers will love this delightful work of children’s verse by poet William Conelly, accompanied by Nadia Kossman’s imaginative, evocative illustrations.
A book of poems by Maria Galina, put together and completed exactly one day before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is Galina’s seventh book of poems. With translations by Anna Halberstadt and Ainsley Morse.
The first bilingual (Russian-English) collection of poems by Aleksandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, “Elements for God” includes poems that predicted – and now chronicle – Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
A book of poems by Yulia Fridman.
“I have been reading Yulia Fridman’s poems for a long time and have admired them for a long time.” (Vladimir Bogomyakov, poet)
