My People Come from Berdychiv
In the white forest of the world
trees hold back the wind, hide tracks
of fox and rabbit in the snow.
In the news hundreds climb from backed-up cars
and walk out of their lives, holding a child’s
hand, a canvas tote, clothes in plastic
garbage bags, gallon water jugs,
a dog with worried eyes
tucked under an arm.
My family left Berdychiv like this
in 1881, fled first to Hamburg,
then for weeks the hold of a ship.
Here in America they boiled plump
chickens, stuffed the necks with matzo meal,
paprika, onions sauteed in schmaltz to make
helzel. The taste and smell of Berdychiv
in the kitchen, fear of Berdychiv
on the porch where they sat behind the locked
screen door, until we stood jiggling the handle
and it was safe to let us in. I used
to joke, they think if they unlock too soon
the Cossacks will slip in. With truncheons.
My father never spent a day
in Berdychiv. But he could smell it
just beyond our safe trimmed lawn.
He installed a burglar alarm.
Every night he turned it on.
I moved far away – six states,
a thousand miles north. For years I walked
the woods alone at night, saw prints of fox
and rabbits in the snow. I left the door unlocked.
But now the Cossacks gallop on my chest.
On the radio, the shriek of air sirens
On screen, an apartment building with its face shot off
On the road to Poland, miles of lined-up empty cars
..
Olga of Kharkiv
A whale sleeps suspended
like a Doric column in the water
rising to the surface for a breath
A whale’s brain sleeps
one side at a time
one eye wide open, vigilant
In the rubble of an empty Kharkiv doorway
a man dozes, uses his remaining hand
to pull his coat around his missing arm
A bowhead whale can live to be 200
grow up to 60 feet
crush a foot-thick wall of ice with its giant skull
A bowhead has no teeth, its plates of baleen
thick as horse manes hang from each jaw
to strain and swallow microscopic plankton
*
In the world of marine science Olga is famous.
In the sea of Okhotsk she launched the drone that filmed
the first known orcas teaming up to pin
a solitary bowhead into place:
two swarmed front and back, the others
rammed it from each side, crushing its ribs;
they ripped out giant chunks
of blubber with their teeth.
Olga says each member has a job.
For 25 years the whales were Olga’s job.
She lived in Moscow, worked to save
the bowheads in the Sea of Okhotsk–
only a few hundred are left. She stepped
one night onto a train and stepped off
at the border where her brother picked
her up and drove home to Kharkiv.
It was February 2022.
The next day tanks arrived.
*
Olga’s job these days is hunter.
She’s fluent in three languages
and how to requisition for the army,
skilled at finding medicine and food,
wool coats and towels, bandages,
and drones, thermal underwear.
She clears a pile of rubble
from a bombed-out building when she stops
to speak to a reporter, then poses
with her team. Her uniform’s a yellow vest
over a sea-blue sweatshirt; the men
all wear fatigues,
assault rifles slung across their ribs.
Olga speaks into the mike: I have no time
to think of science. I loved my work
but this is my work now. Now she sleeps
with one eye open. Now, she says
the whales will have to save themselves.
*
Lines in italics are quotes from interviews with Olga Shpak https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/05/olga-shpak-whale-conservation-science-russia-ukraine/
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg1675
© Kathy Shorr
Kathy Shorr grew up by two rivers, the Ohio and the Tennessee, and has lived for many years near the tip of Cape Cod. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Passager, Nebraska Review, One, and other publications, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She earned an MFA from Vermont College.
The Loch Raven Review 