Four Seasons Gone
(for the outpouring of poems by many who have never written poems before
in Ukraine during the war)
There can be no canticles, matins, evensong
no waiting for blue irises, cherries to come along
in their own season, with four seasons gone.
How bravely you bear witness, testify tight-lipped,
with scribbles on wings, inscribing verses
on the green scum of ponds, passing hearses
pattering your lines. And your words creep
into the cracks in syllables fractured by shells;
then steal from town squares swung tongues of bells.
Following the Stations of each patriot’s Cross,
you throw lifelines across pages to forestall loss.
The light, with no warning, has been burgled by dark.
There is no war, the Kremlin insists, trench-talk
gagged, missile smoke dismissed as lengths,
for cradles, of organic cotton, bombs
just the claps of an audience at a show. Yet –
over spat-out cherry stones, your poems will go on
daring the unsayable, with four seasons gone.
This week’s poem is from A Ghosting in Ukraine, a pamphlet by Patricia McCarthy, shortly to be issued by Dare-Gale Press. It includes tributes to the quietly heroic survivors of bombardment, such as the housewives who stubbornly continue to peg out the weekly wash: for them, waiting for news of husbands and sons at the front, hope is not “the thing with feathers” but simply “a single feather” that will float “under a sky that rumbles no godsend – a plume / pen from a crane, storm petrel, // white stork”. Epistolary poems are addressed to various artists who, like the Odesa-born poet Anna Akhmatova, have Ukrainian connections that are sometimes overlooked. Akhmatova is one of the particularly present “ghosts” in the pamphlet: “How they need you now … // to speak arias rather than folk-tunes and stand at the gate / of their suffering.” Others addressees are the painter Marc Chagall, the composer Tchaikovsky (“most at home in Ukraine”) and the poet Osip Mandelstam.
Four Seasons Gone is the closing poem, its title pointing to the devastation which few, at the end of February 2022, expected to continue for so long. Like the other poems which speak “for the people” it focuses on hope and resilience, and in its epigraph, welcomes the “outpouring” of poetry by those who’ve been compelled to write by their experiences of the war. These occasional poets are the “you” the poem addresses.
Its division into stanzas of different lengths (tercet, quatrain, two couplets, tercet, quatrain), and the rhyme patterns, emphasise basic techniques of poem-making, implying perhaps a debate with the more romantic and magical view of “scribbles on wings” or words inscribed “on the green scum of ponds”. Words are shaken and reduced to hiding: they “creep // into the cracks in syllables fractured by shells” but, subsequently gaining strength from their communal role, they “steal from town squares swung tongues of bells”.
Religion hasn’t been outlawed in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, but some Ukrainian Christians object to the imposition of religion “as taught by Moscow”. The rituals of observance may in any case succumb to wartime conditions. Perhaps the poem’s opening line alludes to the physical destruction of the spaces made for “canticles, matins, evensong”. Poetry may inhabit some of that damaged sacred space. The theme is picked up in stanza four when the poets honour the combatants at their particular Stations of the Cross and, in writing, “throw lifelines across pages to forestall loss”. The repeated phonemes, cross, across, loss, bring heaviness to the couplet, a sense of the unwieldy size and structure of a dragged crucifix.
Poetry’s virtue is defined, in lines 12-16, by its opposition to propaganda and disinformation, “trench-talk / gagged, missile smoke dismissed as lengths, // for cradles, of organic cotton, bombs/ just the claps of an audience at a show”. The reference to lengths of organic cotton relates to an alleged description on Russian TV of the smoke from a Ukrainian missile-strike as хлопок (khlopok), a word whose meanings include “cotton”. Turning it into a mass of organic cotton of the kind used to swathe or line cradles, McCarthy adds poignant irony to the euphemism, since cradles are robbed, not furnished, by missiles. Another meaning of хлопок is the noun clap – so bombs are reported in the ridicule of misinformation as “just the claps of the audience at a show”. (There’s an effective first world war echo, too, in that use of “show”). The crux of the argument is that when authority twists words out of their meaning, people enter a darkness more radical than being “kept in the dark”. Poets, of course, can engage in word-trickery themselves, but not usually with authoritarian intent. Four Seasons Gone sustains its faith in the people’s power to speak their truth through poetry. The genre is not seen in Ukraine (or by ordinary Russians) as the preserve of an elite, and McCarthy’s poem shares and mirrors that view.
What was invoked at the beginning of the poem – sacred ritual, the blue irises and cherries that are longed-for markers in the turning year, aren’t restored at the end. There’s only the image of “spat out cherry stones”, perhaps telling us summer’s over, or there have been no cherries at all that season: people were given stones instead. But the poems “will go on” – being written, surviving in hearers’ minds – because they bear witness. The implications are far-reaching; politicians are ultimately in charge of what may or shouldn’t be said by people, and a penalty for speaking out can be demanded anywhere and at any time. No one, now, sees how or when the war will end, or what other conflict it may breed, particularly now the distant view of the negotiating table has faded.
It’s hard to keep pace with the poetry of the war. Here are some English translations of work by some well-established Ukrainian poets that readers elsewhere may not so far have discovered.
