I'm Italy Mone, and this is The Slowdown.

If you've listened to the show before, you've probably heard me talk about my exchange

sister in Ukraine from 30 years ago, Valya. We finally reconnected when she emailed me out

of the blue through my website, and now we email a couple times a week. She tells me of her life

in Kiev, and I try my best to sound supportive and offer some semblance of normalcy.

She's living in the midst of war and all the horrors that entails, and somehow she manages to sound

hopeful, to sound strong. Lately, her emails have been making me cry and worry. How much can one

person take? How much can a people take? I think of our days together walking by the river,

how young we were, how fresh-faced and ready for the world, and this is the world we were given.

And yet, Valya is still Valya, warm and kind and tough as nails.

Today's poem explores what it is to be living in the shadow of war and how history's rage can

permeate a landscape. Home is still possible there by Katarina Kulitko, translated from the Ukrainian

by Olena Jennings and Aksana Lutsitsina. Home is still possible there where they hang laundry

out to dry, and the bedsheets smell of wind and plum blossoms. It is the season of the first

intimacy to be consummated, never to be repeated. Every leaf emerges as a green blade, and the cries

of life take over the night and find a rhythm. Fragile tin foil of the season when apricots first

form, along with wars and infants, in the same spoonful of air, in the stifling bedrooms or in

the cold, from which the wandering beg to enter, like a bloom of jellyfish or migratory blossoms,

the April frost hunts white-eyed, sharp clawed, but the babies had the same fuzzy skin for protection.

What makes them different is how they break, when the time comes for them to fall, or if they get

totally crushed. Behind the wall a drunken one-armed neighbor stumbles around his house, confusing all

the epochs, his shoulder bumps into metal crutches from World War I, a Soviet helmet made of cardboard,

...