'Yesterday a missile hit. Tonight, we have poetry': the writers drawing crowds on Ukraine's frontlines

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/14/poetry-readings-ukraine-frontline

‘Yesterday a missile hit. Tonight, we have poetry’: the writers drawing crowds on Ukraine’s frontlines

As Ukraine remains under Russian bombardment and the election of Trump adds a new level of fear, its residents are turning to the power of literature to console and inspire in even the darkest days

Iryna Tsilyk
Thu 14 Nov 2024 06.38 EST

As a film-maker and a poet, I like strange, whimsical contrasts, and as a Ukrainian I often feel that our daily routine exclusively consists of them. For example, the day starts with news about the election of a new US president, and we are in the hotel in Zaporizhzhia sadly singing along to Summertime Sadness on the radio. Who are we? The Ukrainian poet and soldier Yaryna Chornohuz; the German writer and journalist Ronya Othmann, who has come to Ukraine for the first time since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion; and me. We are travelling together with a legendary Ukrainian poet, Yuri Izdryk, and the head of the literary corporation Meridian Czernowitz, Svyatoslav Pomerantsev who has organised this tour to the frontline cities in southern Ukraine.

Yesterday, a ballistic Russian missile hit Zaporizhzhia and killed eight civilians, but tonight we have poetry readings here. The event is not cancelled, because such tragedies occur in Ukraine almost every day, and people need some consolation – and even fun. Nonetheless, today is full of anxiety. “What do your Ukrainian friends write about Trump?” Ronya asks me while I’m scrolling the feed. “They darkly joke about world war three. And what about your German friends?” “They write: ‘Oh, what will happen to Ukraine now?!’”

In their place, I would ask: what will happen to the whole of Europe? Besides my trips around Ukraine, I travel to various countries in central and western Europe and often feel Europeans’ fear that the war may go too far. There’s a clear goal for us Ukrainians. We need to survive and preserve our statehood, and so we “keep calm and carry on”, even if the global political arena has turned into a bloody circus, democracies decline, and the horizon of future planning is hazy. Don’t you know what to do? Start with small steps: wash the dishes, clean the weapon, donate to the production of drones and read poems for the people in whose city a missile landed and killed civilians again.

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