Edith Sitwell on World War II and Serhiy Zhadan’s poem about Ukraine

 I have no experience of war in my life. I have heard my grandfather and grandmother talking about the Second World War, where there was a shortage of food, and how the lights were switched off at night due to air raids. Today is the birth anniversary of Edith Sitwell British poet, who was born on September 7, 1887. She wrote the poem ‘Still Falls the Rain’ about the Blitz. 

Still falls the Rain—- 

Dark as the world of man, black as our loss—- 

Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails 

Upon the Cross. 

Still falls the Rain 

With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat 

In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet

‘Take Only What Is Most Important’, a poem by Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan that describes the difficult choices people must make when fleeing their homes due to war.

Take only what is most important. 

Take the letters. 

Take only what you can carry. 

Take the icons and the embroidery, take the silver, 

Take the wooden crucifix and the golden replicas. 

Take some bread, the vegetables from the garden, then leave. 

We will never return again. 

We will never see our city again. 

Take the letters, all of them, every last piece of bad news. 

We will never see our corner store again. 

We will never drink from that dry well again. 

We will never see familiar faces again. 

We are refugees. We’ll run all night. 

We will run past fields of sunflowers. 

We will run from dogs, rest with cows. 

We’ll scoop up water with our bare hands, 

sit waiting in camps, annoying the dragons of war. 

You will not return and friends will never come back. 

There will be no smoky kitchens, no usual jobs, 

There will be no dreamy lights in sleepy towns, 

no green valleys, no suburban wastelands. 

The sun will be a smudge on the window of a cheap train, 

rushing past cholera pits covered with lime. 

There will be blood on women’s heels, tired guards on borderlands covered with snow, 

a postman with empty bags shot down, 

a priest with a hapless smile hung by his ribs, 

the quiet of a cemetery, the noise of a command post, and unedited lists of the dead, 

so long that there won’t be enough time 

to check them for your own name. 

Translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps