The boys are setting to work with the chainsaws again

You can watch them, bright orange helmets

Yellow high vis jackets, and hear the machinery sing

And see the weeping birches fall

As the metal teeth tear through their silver skin

 

 

And I watch from the layby where I pulled over

And I think of Coleridge's woman

Wailing somewhere for her demon lover

Wailing in the lines of poetry forever,

And how history can never separate love:

 

Though the weeping birches fall after each other,

But pause for a moment before they fall,

Balanced on the wound that cannot hold together,

The emptiness of the human soul

Toppling through broken altitudes of weather

 

Though rain, sun, snow can never make it whole.

Stephen Komarnyckyj runs Kalyna Language Press, which publishes his own poetry and translations, and has taught at The Poetry School and translated a series of Ukrainian poets and their blogs for The Poetry School site under the title "Stanzas for Ukraine."