Diary: Of War And Its Horror

Ilya Kaminsky @ilya_poet Jun 29

Friends: Anastasia Afanasieva is a brilliant poet from Kharkiv, Ukraine, who survived for many days in basement hiding from bombs and is now a refugee. Her niece tells me Anastasia is still struggling to make ends meet.

Might you help her Go Fund Me campaign?

Ilya Kaminsky @ilya_poet Apr 24

In addition to all other horror, Russians just bombed the cemetery where my adopted grandmother, Natalia, is buried.

She’s Ukrainian woman who hid my Jewish father during World War Two when Odesa was occupied.

She hid him for the long years of war. They’re bombing her cemetery

Ilya Kaminsky @ilya_poet Apr 24

What do you do, when in your 80s, after a long Covid you’re learning to sit & walk again & meanwhile, an empire-next-door announces
its plans to bomb your city b/c it “needs a corridor” to another territory (that it stole 30 yrs ago from a neighboring country)?

Such questions.

Ilya Kaminsky @ilya_poet Apr 1

“I am unable to read anything except the news—so don’t ask me about my writing. My attitude toward the Russian language has not
changed. No, I don’t speak the language of the occupiers of my country. It is they who stole my language.”

—Vadim Landa, a writer from Odesa

Ilya Kaminsky @ilya_poet Dec 5

Halyna Kruk, translated from Ukrainian by
Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk:
the right hemisphere can’t see the trees for
the forest
the left hemisphere can’t see the forest for
the trees
right and left, right and left
a human walks in the woods like an echo, lost
in thought, distracted
some bullet moves with its own velocity
it’s own trajectory, let loose
in a right or a left hemisphere. somebody’s.
the earth’s.

Ilya Kaminsky @ilya_poet Dec 5

Ilya Kaminsky @ilya_poet Jun 29

“Morning: they are bombing the city. Night: I am editing my poems. Morning: bombardments again.”

—so grateful to LA Review of Book for publishing conversations with Ukrainian poets @katiefar and I did:

Ilya Kaminsky @ilya_poet Jun 14

In Odesa, Ukraine, it is a vacation season.

In Odesa, Ukraine, it is a war season.

So people do sunbathing at the barricades.

Thanks to Sergey Naumovich for the photo:

(This appeared in the print edition as "War Diary")

Ilya Kaminsky holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He is the author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odesa