Letters
Hanna Komar
1
‘Sunflower is Ukrainian,’
wrote Clarice Lispector,
whose parents moved to Brazil
from the pogroms
in Ukraine in the 1920s,
who I am reading
on a plane
taking me to one of the few countries
I don’t need a visa.
Was the sunflower that I played with
as a child
in my grandmother's vegetable garden
in a town to the west of Belarus
Ukrainian too?
And whose are the borders?
…
The air in the pores of the soil
inside a worm that travels across the border,
without permission,
unnoticed,
not defined
by the colour of a passport,
by the colour
What colour is a failed uprising?
I want to be the soil inside the worm crossing the border,
the air in its pores, smuggled without a passport,
without the colour of my passport
checked for humanity,
without humiliation
of the failed uprising
participant
Where do you come from? Where do you
come back from? When will
you come back from
where you are from?
Are you from?
Out?
Out of?
Are you a pronoun? Preposition? Noun? A space? A dash? A comma? A sunflower at the border?
A worm cut in two by
the spade digging a grave…
2
I swallowed the streets of Minsk,
the sunsets over the roofs,
reflections in the windows,
the shudder of…
I swallowed my boxes with books,
my favourite dress,
my medical records,
my hormonal tests and
I swallowed the problems I had with my parents,
the gaps in our ancestral history,
the hollows of memory.
The sunflower seeds in my mother’s fingers…
When I come back,
we will cry.
When I come back,
it will feel like I’ve never left.
When I come back,
you will come back too --
if you want,
if you left,
if there’s anything left for you, if you
are also a language.
Lost and found,
disappearing and reappearing — soil
in and out of the soft worm’s body
Never certain that this time it will work.
But always believing.
Always turned to the sun like a sunflower’s head.
When I come back,
I will watch my mama’s fingers
flipping sunflower seeds
in our kitchen.
In her kitchen.
The seeds will disappear in her mouth
like the days we spent apart. We
won’t talk about
the life
which has passed
between
come
and
back
3
What happens to the worm cut in two?
What happens to a ripped up passport?
What happens to the border if a country stops existing?
Sunflower’s head is made up of two thousand florets…
A worm has five hearts.
My face is always turned towards home.
I haven’t come back yet,
but I already cry…
‘Sunflower is Ukrainian,’
wrote Clarice Lispector,
whose parents moved to Brazil
from the pogroms
in Ukraine in the 1920s,
who I am reading
on a plane
taking me to one of the few countries
I don’t need a visa.
Was the sunflower that I played with
as a child
in my grandmother's vegetable garden
in a town to the west of Belarus
Ukrainian too?
And whose are the borders?
…
The air in the pores of the soil
inside a worm that travels across the border,
without permission,
unnoticed,
not defined
by the colour of a passport,
by the colour
What colour is a failed uprising?
I want to be the soil inside the worm crossing the border,
the air in its pores, smuggled without a passport,
without the colour of my passport
checked for humanity,
without humiliation
of the failed uprising
participant
Where do you come from? Where do you
come back from? When will
you come back from
where you are from?
Are you from?
Out?
Out of?
Are you a pronoun? Preposition? Noun? A space? A dash? A comma? A sunflower at the border?
A worm cut in two by
the spade digging a grave…
2
I swallowed the streets of Minsk,
the sunsets over the roofs,
reflections in the windows,
the shudder of…
I swallowed my boxes with books,
my favourite dress,
my medical records,
my hormonal tests and
I swallowed the problems I had with my parents,
the gaps in our ancestral history,
the hollows of memory.
The sunflower seeds in my mother’s fingers…
When I come back,
we will cry.
When I come back,
it will feel like I’ve never left.
When I come back,
you will come back too --
if you want,
if you left,
if there’s anything left for you, if you
are also a language.
Lost and found,
disappearing and reappearing — soil
in and out of the soft worm’s body
Never certain that this time it will work.
But always believing.
Always turned to the sun like a sunflower’s head.
When I come back,
I will watch my mama’s fingers
flipping sunflower seeds
in our kitchen.
In her kitchen.
The seeds will disappear in her mouth
like the days we spent apart. We
won’t talk about
the life
which has passed
between
come
and
back
3
What happens to the worm cut in two?
What happens to a ripped up passport?
What happens to the border if a country stops existing?
Sunflower’s head is made up of two thousand florets…
A worm has five hearts.
My face is always turned towards home.
I haven’t come back yet,
but I already cry…
Hanna Komar is a poet, translator, writer. She has recently published a bilingual poetry collection Ribwort (in Belarusian and in English): the stories of a woman growing and living in a patriarchal state and collective experiences of state violence under dictatorship. Hanna has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster and is taking a PhD on using poetry to support Belarusian women to share experiences of domestic abuse and state violence.
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