Menu
Menu
Menu
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).
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
This collection of personal essays by a bi-national Russian/U.S. author offers glimpses into many things Soviet and post-Soviet: the sacred, the profane, the mundane, the little-discussed and the often-overlooked. What was a Soviet school dance like? Did communists go to church? Did communists listen to Donna Summer? If you want to find out, read on!
