Justyna Bargielska
Translated from the Polish by Maria Jastrzębska
On my ninth birthday the scoutmaster
gave me a card with the number of days
I'd already lived. It was an extraordinary number
shimmering and dancing, one of those numbers
you can't save
in notches on a wolf's bone
or in letters or digits, you can only
speak it onto a recordable postcard or carve it in basalt.

Do you know what our odds are? Zero.
But I've learnt to play for time
as it's the body no less which is left on the battlefield.


WIELKI PLAN B

Na dziewiąte urodziny drużynowy 
dał mi kartkę z liczbą dni, 
które do tej pory przeżyłam. To była niezwykła liczba, 
migocząca i grająca, jedna z tych liczb
których nie da się zapisać
ani nacięciami na kości wilka
ani literami, ani cyframi, można ją tylko
nagrać jak pocztówkę albo wyryć w bazalcie.

Wiesz jakie mamy szanse? Zerowe.
Ale nauczyłam się, że należy grać na zwłokę,
bo właśnie ciało to jest to, co zostaje na polu bitwy.
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YEMENI POETRY THRIVES DESPITE TRAUMA OF CIVIL WAR
 
"Sung and recited poetry is loved all over the Arab world, but especially so in Yemen.... Even now, four years into Yemen’s civil war, established poets and emerging young writers are exploring how the art form can unite people on different sides of the war’s many fault lines." 

via THE GUARDIAN
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Pictured is Ilya Kaminsky's hand-written version of the poem.

"Aleksandr Blok’s little poem wasn’t the first one I fell in love with, but it was the first poem I read that showed me that poetry isn’t there merely to relay information. The poem is not about the event. It is the event. This poem’s repetitions and syntax enact what it says."
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