Red

by Dzvinia Orlowsky

Red

In 2020, I would have believed
the red bird anchoring itself on the lowest
branch of the slumping lilac bush
in early March came to show me that bright 
beauty exists where you least expect it,

that I still had time to see, fear-
free, a coastline of breath to be inhaled 
and exhaled deeply, to rush through my nightly
prayers in Ukrainian as if I had an “in” 
with God, both of us in agreement: 

Який безлад! What a mess! God in 
an over-sized coat, looking for his hat,
me in a red flapper dress, black-fringed 
and silver-sequenced like a body of water
taking shape—iron, reeds, stars.

Now there is no window to look out from
where the eye doesn’t skim silence—
a dormant field’s name tag of black stubble,
trees that wandered out from huge darkness
forgetting important IDs and documents

left behind on some metal table. What do they 
sound like to us— really—these explosions
that come through our TVs, that taught fire
to scream in 2022, screams that caught 
fire?  We have words but have lost

the warmth of flesh. In the day’s last trace,
the bird that flew onto my branch 
may have mistaken our house for another. 
Or not knowing in which direction 
it was meant to fly, mistook our grey shingles

for woodland doors, our round rock 
garden as the halo it’d been promised 
in bird dreams
in bird prayer
red feathered, black beaked.

Orlowsky

Award-winning Ukrainian-American poet, translator and a founding editor of Four Way Books, Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of seven poetry collections including her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest. Her co-translation with Ali Kinsella of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s The Enchanted Desna is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press.

Author photo by Sharona Jacobs.