Ilya Kaminsky Poems

And when they bombed other people's houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
...

Dr. Alfonso Barabinsky wants
to go outside
I hold him down with my smaller body.
He walks, runs from his shoes to my kitchen.
...

I watch loud animal bones in their faces & I can smell the earth.
Our boys want a public killing in a sunlit piazza
They drag a young policeman, a sign in his arms swaying
...

Love cities, this is what my brother taught me
as he cut soldiers' hair, then tidied tomatoes
watching Sonya and I dance on a soapy floor—
I open the window, say in a low voice, my brother.
...

To your voice, a mysterious virtue,
to the 53 bones of one foot, the four dimensions of breathing,
...

[an elegy for Osip Mandelstam]
[A modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow searched across one sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside,
...

In plain speech, for the sweetness
between the lines is no longer important,
what you call immigration I call suicide.
I am sending, behind the punctuation,
...

1.

Such is the story made of stubbornness and a little air,
a story sung by those who danced before the Lord in quiet.
Who whirled and leapt. Giving voice to consonants that rise
...

That was the morning strange helicopters circled.
That was the morning we damned only the earth.
We saw a soldier aim and the deaf boy Petya took iron and fire in his mouth.
His father
...

Momma Galya Armolinskaya, 63, is having more sex than you and I.
When she walks across her balcony

and the soldier "Oh" stands up
...