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Now if you’d leave me in peace.
Now if you’d get on without me.

I am going to close my eyes

And I only want five things,
five favorite roots.

The first is love without end.

The second is to see autumn.
I cannot be without leaves
flying away and returning to earth.

Third is grave winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of a fire in a wilderness of cold.

In fourth place is summertime
round like a watermelon.

The fifth thing is your eyes,
Matilde, my love, my beloved,
I don’t want to sleep without your eyes,
I don’t want to be without you seeing me:
I’d trade springtime
for your gaze still upon me.

My friends, all of that is what I want.
It’s nearly nothing and almost everything.

And now if you wish you may leave.

So much have I lived that one day
you’ll have to make yourselves forget me,
erasing the blackboard of me:
my heart was endless.

But just because I ask for silence
don’t go thinking I’m about to die:
au contraire!:
it so happens I am going to be lived.

It just so happens that I am and I keep being.

I will not be dying for within me
grains will grow,
first the kernels that break through
the ground to see light,
but mother earth is dark:
and inside me I am dark:
I am like a well in whose waters
the nighttime leaves her stars
and goes on alone through the fields.

This is about my having lived so much
that I want to live another much.

Never have I felt such resonance,
never have I had so many kisses.

Now, as always, it is early.
The light takes flight with her bees.

Leave me alone with this day.
I ask permission to be born.

There was a time when voices emanating from my pants
would have caused concern. But now I simply shrugged
and pulled my phone to hear a recording:
“You have reached the Son of God.
I am currently speaking with another supplicant.
But please hold: your salvation is important to me.”

This was followed by music.
I expected celestial choirs or maybe an elevator-friendly
version of “My Sweet Lord,” but was instead treated
to acoustic Delta blues guitar, interrupted after
a few minutes by the voice of Himself, greeting me
by name and asking how he could serve.

I was startled. Didn’t expect to actually get through.
“Umm…what’s the one true religion?” I asked,
flustered, just to have something to say.
“All of them,” he replied, “None of them.”

I was taken aback. “What? That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he said.“Follow the Golden Rule.
Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.
Anything else? I have a lot of people on hold.”
I had nothing, and mumbled my thanks.

He said, “Go in Peace”and broke the connection.
I put down the phone and stared out the window.
The guy across the street was clearing snow
off his sidewalk. Never really liked that dude,
but I grabbed my shovel to go lend a hand.

Svitlana Povaliaieva (b. 1974) is a Ukrainian poet, journalist, and activist. Her two sons served in the Ukrainian armed forces after the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022. Her younger son Roman Ratushnyi was killed in action that June. Her elder son Vasyl Ratushnyi was killed in action in February of last year. 
Vilʹna Ukrayina!!

Sing
When you sing in the shower
When you dance with your shadow in the kitchen
When you talk to the trees, the river, the animals
When you rush to throw off your shoes to go barefoot
When you laugh and cry with and against the wind
When you run to the flood with outstretched hands
When you climb so very very high and stop just before you leap
Because it seems to you that you can fly
Although you know that no you can’t fly
When you don’t remember when and how you do all this
When you suddenly become a book that isn’t you

Pilot
I’m a pilot,
I’m a ball,
I’m a woman, struck
deaf blind
until now a mother
and still one
so long as the force
of love and fury
holds up the world
and someone’s child
I’ll be a light
when I die

I think every human being
eventually has a moment
where they are standing outside in sweatpants
that have lost the will to be pants,
holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket,
or some other receipt from the universe
that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.”

And then the sky bruises purple.

And the air touches your face
like it knows your whole story.

And suddenly you realize:

all the real is actually unreal.

The dirt.
The breath.
The weird little bones in your hands.
The fact that we are here,
on a floating rock with pollen counts,
paying bills,
missing dead people,
loving living people
who say “leaving now”
while still fully naked and looking for socks.

And still,
the moon clocks in.
No applause.
No benefits.
No note from management saying,
“Great work being ancient and luminous again.”

Just the moon,
working nights
like a single mother with no applause,
packing silver lunches
for every dark thing
that still has to rise.

Tell me that isn’t holy.
Tell me there is a better word
than sacred
for the way light keeps returning
with no guarantee
we will actually stop and take note.

I know people who believe in therapy,
probiotics,
tarot,
twelve-step meetings,
manifestation journals,
and waiting exactly eleven minutes
before texting back
so they do not appear emotionally available,
even though their whole nervous system
is standing in the driveway holding flowers.

And underneath all of it,
every ritual,
every doctrine,
every smoothie with chia seeds,
the prayer is the same:

Please let me be loved.
Please let me be forgiven.
Please let this strange little life
mean something
before my lower back
submits its formal resignation.

What is going on?

For real tho—What is this place?

This unbearable tenderness
of being alive long enough
to watch steam lift from coffee in winter
like a soul practicing leaving.

To see your friend laugh so hard
they slap the table
as if joy is a mosquito
they are trying to kill.

To hear a child say “pisghetti”
and, for one shining second,
realize language
has finally been improved.

I know I already noted this in the first piece,
but the older I get,
the less use I have for certainty.

Certainty has never made me pull over
because the sunset looked like God
dropped a jar of peach jam
across the whole midwestern sky
and decided to be lazy
and not clean up.

Certainty has never made me gasp
at rain on hot pavement.

Certainty has never found me
in the cereal aisle,
holding Captain Crunch,
suddenly remembering
that everyone I have ever loved
was made from stardust,
hunger,
and a series of decisions
we probably should have slept on.

No.
It has always been awe.

Awe was the first church.

Before steeples.
Before committees.
Before men got involved
and started making rules about skirts.

Awe was there
with its wild hair
and muddy feet,
saying:

Look.
Look again.
Look until looking
becomes love.

Awe, and soup.

Awe, and someone rubbing your back
when you are sick.
Awe, and old couples at Target
arguing gently about avocados,
as if marriage is not one vow
but ten thousand errands
performed beside the person
who knows exactly
how you like the cart pushed.

Maybe gratitude
was never meant to sound elegant.

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Damn.
That woodpecker is trying
to beat that tree from itself.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you, body,
for continuing to drag me through this world
despite the many slim jims
I have done to you
at gas stations.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you to the dogs
who lose their entire minds
when we come home
as if we have returned from war
and not Walgreens.”

For me, that might be my gospel.

That joy that does not wait for us
to be impressive but only needs us
to come through the door.

Because the truth is,
this life is devastating.

And ridiculous.

One minute you are 22 and invincible,
driving too fast,
eating gas station nachos
with the confidence of a Greek god.

The next minute you are googling,
“Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?”
and the answer is,
apparently,
“Welcome to the second half of your life.”

But even now—

even tired,
even grieving,
even emotionally held together
by iced coffee, playlists,
and one very specific wolves hoodie—

we keep finding reasons
to stay soft.

We plant tomatoes
even though grief is real.

We bake bread
even though the news is on fire.

We send photos of the sky
to people we love
with captions like,
“LOOK,”
as if beauty is an emergency
and we are all volunteer firefighters.

We keep saying,
“You have to see this,”
because wonder
is the oldest form
of resurrection.

So here’s to the believers
and the atheists
and the agnostics
and the people whose entire theology
is just trying not to cry
in the DMV line.

Here’s to the people clinging to faith.

Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax
and oat milk
and the one group chat
where nobody pretends to be okay.

Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos.

The accidental mystics.

The ones who can contemplate mortality
for six straight hours
and then become emotionally attached
to a perfect peach.

The ones who know
despair has a mouth,
but so does laughter.

May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty
in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.
May we never become so polished
that we forget how to stand
in the Starbucks line of existence
with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open,
feeling the enormity of it all
rattle around in our bones
like thunder
looking for somewhere to laugh.

And may we remember:

whatever else this is,
whatever mess,
whatever miracle,
whatever cosmic group project
no one was prepped for—

all’ve it is astonishing.
that we are here.
that we have loved enough to be ruined.
that the moon keeps showing up.
that bread exists.

So pass it on.

Tear off a piece
with your bare hands.

Take it in as you take it down.

And then go outside and look at that moon.

They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways—
perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?

I want to ask them
if they don’t remember—
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a “sorry” muttered in a crowd?
a curt “wrong number” caught in the receiver?—
but I know the answer.
No, they don’t remember.

They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.

Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.

There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn’t read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood’s thicket?

There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning.

Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

Blackness
is a title,
is a preoccupation,
is a commitment Blacks
are to comprehend—
and in which you are
to perceive your Glory.

The conscious shout
of all that is white is
“It’s Great to be white.”
The conscious shout
of the slack in Black is
It’s Great to be white.”
Thus all that is white
has white strength and yours.

The word Black
has geographic power,
pulls everybody in:
Blacks here—
Blacks there—
Blacks wherever they may be.
And remember, you Blacks, what they told you—
remember your Education:
“one Drop—one Drop
maketh a brand new Black.”
Oh mighty Drop.
_____And because they have given us kindly
so many more of our people

Blackness
stretches over the land.
Blackness—
the Black of it,
the rust-red of it,
the milk and cream of it,
the tan and yellow-tan of it,
the deep-brown middle-brown high-brown of it,
the “olive” and ochre of it—
Blackness
marches on.

The huge, the pungent object of our prime out-ride
is to Comprehend,
to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black,
which is our “ultimate Reality,”
which is the lone ground
from which our meaningful metamorphosis,
from which our prosperous staccato,
group or individual, can rise.

Self-shriveled Blacks.
Begin with gaunt and marvelous concession:
YOU are our costume and our fundamental bone.

      All of you—
you COLORED ones,
you NEGRO ones,
those of you who proudly cry
“I’m half INDian”—
those of you who proudly screech
“I’VE got the blood of George WASHington in MY
veins”
ALL of you—
you proper Blacks
you half-Blacks,
you wish-I-weren’t Blacks,
Niggeroes and Niggerenes.

       You.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.