Essays, Art and Plays by Dan

Mykola Ivanovych, a farmer, aged 72, speaks:

How can I measure the distance of loss,
when it is not in kilometers,
but in the unfathomable chasm
between a heart and its birthplace?
Oh, Ukraine—my soil, my sky—
you are not just a country.
You are a hymn etched into my bones,
a river that flows, even when unseen,
through the cracks of my shattered days.

I carried your fields with me once—
the sunflowers, obedient to the sun,
their golden heads bowing
as if in prayer.
I held your rivers in my palms,
let their silken tongues whisper
secrets of eternity to my skin.
Now, the rivers run somewhere I cannot follow,
their voices drowned
by the thunder of war,
by the silence that comes after.

My feet now walk on unfamiliar stones,
and my tongue stumbles
on words that taste like dust.
Here, in this borrowed corner of the world,
the air carries no scent of wheat.
It carries only memory,
and memory is heavier than iron.
I am bent beneath its weight.

I left behind the chair I built with my own hands,
its wood still warm from mornings of my children’s laughter.
I left behind the walls that bore their height marks,
each line a monument
to the quiet victory of their growing.
And my wife’s garden—
how can I speak of her garden,
where each petal was a fragment
of her devotion?
Gone now.
Or worse: trampled.
Or worse still: blooming, but unseen.

I am a father, still.
Even now, in this place of waiting,
I carry my children as I carried them once
on my shoulders,
when they were too small to see over the fences of the world.
Now, I carry their fears instead,
their silent questions,
their unspoken grief.
They do not cry where I can hear them—
a mercy, or a cruelty?
Perhaps both.

But I am also a seed,
blown far from the furrows that cradled me.
And a seed does not weep for the soil it has lost;
it digs into the foreign ground,
searching, always searching,
for water, for light.
What else can a father do?
What else can a man do,
but rise each day and say to the sun,
“I am still here”?

And yet, Ukraine—my love, my sorrow—
I hear you in the wind,
feel you in the fluttering of unseen wings.
You are not gone.
You are the prayer I teach my children,
the song I hum when the dark grows thick.
You are the bridge
I will someday cross,
if not with my body,
then with the memory of my voice,
calling to yours.

Do you hear me, my fields, my rivers, my skies?
I am still your son,
even in exile.
Even in silence.
Even in the ache of forgetting,
and the deeper ache of remembering.
I am yours,
and you are mine,
as long as there is breath in me
to whisper your name:
Ukraine.