First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Premonition  Solemn are lonely mornings in February.  Snow drops off poplars with shivering shyness.  On weathered wallpaper the outline of  a windowpane slants with trembling ochre.  Oboes launch into a procession of chaconnes,  and leaves still rustle, falling from slowly  revolving chandeliers.  Forgotten by someone or by us,  there’s an open Riesling  and years sealed with wax.  The home we left belongs to the dusty  boots of an alien, nomadic spirit —  discomfort, the flying clang of trams  that won’t take off, the curtains, once  pulled shut with their segment of the sun,  cut in vermillion.    Elina Petrova    Donetsk, 1990     Translation for Equinox, Volume 8, Inner Chambers, Secret Rooms, March 2025

These days, with endless Russian depredations in Ukraine, complicitly enabled by our own government, poets such as Ukraine native Elina Petrova can open windows into a world most of us see only in glimpses on the nightly news. “Premonition” is one such poem, published earlier this year in translation. A native of Ukraine, Petrova immigrated to the United States in 2007. An American citizen as of 2014, she is the author of two English-language poetry collections, Miracle (2015) and Desert Candles (2019). Disclosure: I wrote a blurb praising Desert Candles.

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Like the Ukraine-based poems of Desert Candles, “Premonition” is not didactic. Rather than telling us what to think, this poem offers moments in a winter setting, images that flash in the space of a line before the eye moves to another image of desolation.

From “Snow drops off poplars with shivering shyness,” the poem shifts indoors, to light on “weathered wallpaper.” And then, the first surprise—that wreckage of some kind has brought the outdoors in—as “leaves still rustle, falling from slowly / revolving chandeliers.” What I admire here is how deftly Petrova drops us into a room in which leaves are falling and then selects a single tabletop detail I picture beneath the chandeliers: “an open Riesling / and years sealed with wax.” Let that last phrase resonate—“years sealed with wax.” Notice how the word years opens the poem, how the image expands to include a history of such rooms.

A damaged space such as this one is essentially incomplete—no door that closes safely behind us as we leave. An honest photograph—or poem—will render it in fragments. Hence, this poem’s final couplet, leaving the place, the poet, the reader with an incomplete line, a shard—curtains “cut in vermillion.” Oh, and the stanza break: “curtains, once” — so much in the word once suspended there. Once, as in “once upon a time,” with the fairy tale turned apocalyptic. Once, as in once and no more—like other moments, other lines from poems that limn the end of something vital.

Notes

This poem appears in Equinox, a remarkable journal published twice yearly at the spring and fall equinox. The version here is the poet’s translation of her own poem. According to Petrova, “my recent translation for Equinox completely changed the original form and rhythm of a poem I wrote thirty-five years ago in Donetsk. The Russian version consisted of five rhymed quatrains with extensive alliteration.”

Equinox is highly recommended reading. Enjoy it here ⇒

For more about Elina Petrova, see her website ⇒

Aching Miracle is available here ⇒

Desert Candles is available here ⇒

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.