IN THE MORNING OF MY LIFE I thought of light as throbbing. I thought of wind as emptying. I thought of clouds. I drank from the reflections they left on the black metal of the river. Blinded by flashes, I closed my eyes and imagined you, coming back to me. Following your own steps backwards, the steps that led you out of our realm, the steps melting the last snow.
Let it speak, let it speak to the clouds. The whiteness of your voice traveling the air to get to my ear, and down my spine to the loins. The spilled milk of your words. Joy of my mind. I used to see you in every cloud. Every sun-pierced cloud I placed on my chest. They burned my lungs away.
Renata lived on the other side of the river. When the dawn broke, her mother used to milk their cow and walk across the blue fir forest to sell the milk at the farmers market. The girl would be left alone. I watched her drive the cow, Marishka, into the meadow, watched her doing the laundry in the glistening waters, or gathering fallen apples into the hem of her dress. Every day I would put my grandfather’s rocking chair outside, open his book on Classical Mechanics, sit in the shade of an aspen tree and pretend to read. My sight would be tied to Renata’s collarbones. To her tawny silky curls touching her naked shoulders. At times, she lifted her head and our eyes met. Then I’d capture her gaze, as I liked to think, and she would blush, and she wouldn’t be able to look away until I stilled my hunger a little. How much beauty we can taste by mere anticipation is a miracle.
It was a month full of life. You do not get many of them. I left the frenzy of Istanbul to take refuge in the slow nurtured greenness. The contrast was striking. I could not speak for the first two days I spent in my grandparents’ bungalow. And I wouldn’t speak for the rest of twenty something days. My habits were plain, my pace primitive. I would wake up with the roosters, scratch my head, wait for the pesky birds to shut up, roll over and fall asleep again. That was my way of happy living until I met Renata.
The sun burnt my back while I was picking spring onions in my grandparents’ recently abandoned garden. The hot wind was driving me insane. I was going to add those greens to my brown bread and salt breakfast routine, to freshen it up a little. But a cheeky fly attacking my forehead became the last drop in this hellish heat torture. I slapped my face, missed it and growled. I needed to go for a swim.
The stream looked muddy, I rolled up my trousers and made a few steps into the river. Reed was cutting my legs. I went a bit further and felt the slimy shore under my feet. I decided to swim forward, though it wasn’t deep enough for a man my size. I took a breath and dived. My heartbeat slowed down. I was pulled ahead by the flow, as if I had a hook in my throat.
Followed by: the moment I saw her. In so many books you read ‘the moment I saw her’. What is so important about this first encounter? Mine was underwater. There was more than the two of us. The river, an entity ancient and alive, was bringing us together. I thought I wanted to call this girl Renata before she even told me her name.
Her eyes had this otherworldly shimmer in them. Like those beams penetrating layers of water. The cascading honey of her hair. The opalescence of her skin. Her petticoat dancing slowly, revealing her ankles. This vision, then flutter and jolts under my ribs. She smiled. My urge to ascend and breathe getting stronger by the second. She twisted around. I stayed. A few moments later I felt I didn’t need air that much. I wouldn’t drown, and even if I would… Tickling air bubbles, brought to being by her smooth motion were spreading in the water, touching my stomach, as if she touched it. Was she real? Everything went black.
A palm on my cheek, hitting it softly. I opened my eyes and saw Renata again. A sun halo embracing her head. She talked. Her voice was made of berry wine. Its sound, thirst-clenching. She was trying to explain something. Renata spoke a language I didn’t know. I was shaking for at least two reasons.
My best guess was us agreeing on me having a sunstroke, the effect of which had worsened by a contrast with the cold water I was silly enough to dive in. Renata spoke with her hands. She also pronounced strange crunchy words. The way she talked to me, a thunder and a bird thrill both in her mouth. I didn’t want to understand her, I craved for her to go on.
‘I want to show you the Galata Tower,’ I said, not knowing why.
I couldn’t afford to return there even on my own, unless I sold this shabby house along with the plot of neglected land. The idea was ridiculous, but it escaped my lips before I could stop myself. My mind was busy. Busy with the thought of her breasts. A thought of cow’s milk. Galatas. Stands for milkman.
‘Ga-la-ta,’ Renata was mocking me. The only word we shared.
‘Can I kiss you?’
What kind of a man would ask this question? You either kiss her there and then, or you hide forever behind the shed, pleasing yourself. I dragged her towards me and sucked on her lower lip. Renata smelled of dairy and wormwood. She knew nothing, but more than I would ever learn. Her bravery, her instincts. Her perfect timing. Her kisses, acts of witchery. Suffocating me with a pleasure too pure. I took her in my arms, and it felt like another sunstroke. Renata, a flawless marine animal dressed in floaty skirts. She gently pushed me away and shook her head. I failed to understand the gesture. She put her finger to her lips and gave a nod towards her log cabin. Was her mother coming home soon? I smiled at her, touched her nose, turned around and jumped into the river. While I was crossing it, I didn’t think of anything. The silence in me engrossed the silence around me.
I had been watching her from afar every morning since the dive. I would wake up with Renata on my mind and go to sleep hoping to see her again the next day. Sometimes I would swim to the other shore and sit on a stump near her cabin. If I was lucky, she would approach me with a mug of fresh milk and a piece of bread.
In the calmness of the noon I would touch her knee through the cotton and get a light slap in the face. The moment after, Renata would laugh and run her fingers through my hair. We would sit together sharing bread soaked in milk. Once she dropped her slice and I caught it. I ate the half and I fed the other half to Renata. Milk was running down her chin. She wiped it with her apron, glanced at me as if she was embarrassed and cast her eyes down.
‘I surrender,’ I said. ‘You’re a torment.’
My words, meaningless sounds to my Renata.
Often, I’d try to tell her a story, swing my arms around, make funny noise. And this girl would laugh, showing her pink gums, the skin on her nose would scrunch up and the little stars of freckles would collide. I thought of her body as a universe of its own. The Milky Way etched onto her skin. Did she have those freckles everywhere?
Day by day, I was observing the slow changes in her. At first, she was curious. She kept on listening to me and pushed me with her elbow if I stopped entertaining her. Though my language was obscure to Renata, our conversations amused her.
We learned each other’s ‘swim’, ‘milk’, ‘mama’ and ‘goodbye’, and it was enough. A bountiful vocabulary for those living in Eden.
Then, she became cautious.
The closer I sat to her, the quieter she’d get. The longer I held her hand, the heavier her breathing. I would swim across the river and rush to her log cabin after her mother’s departure, but Renata wouldn’t care to meet me halfway as she’d done before.
It rained pitchforks, and the heavy clouds blended with the raw iron of storm water, when Renata pressed her palm to my face, and I understood I was no longer welcome on her shore.
‘Anya,’ she said, sighing.
Isten veled*. I saw her mother driving the cow back home from the pasture. She was in distress and shouted something about the milk to us. I assumed Renata revealed to her that we were seeing each other, and that she let me kiss her knuckles and tickle her toes. Of course, her anya* came to the conclusion that I was going to ‘spoil’ her girl. It was time for me to depart, before it all went too far.
I outstretched my hand giving Renata the white teardrop pearl I had found in my grandmother’s jewelry box. Rain filled my palm. I opened it and the pearl slipped through my fingers with the water. Renata’s face was split in two by a flash of lightning. For a second I thought I saw the anger in her, and then it transformed into sheer desperation. She turned away from me and walked up the path to her cabin.
I never treated anyone with such care. I was afraid to ruin her just as much as I wanted to. You can’t pour water into a broken pitcher. I chose this pitcher to be saved from my clumsy hands. I knew better than that. I could just feast my eyes on her. Enjoy the richness of her reactions, imagine her arching her back on my sheets. I could dissolve in serenity whenever we were sitting close enough to share our breaths, savor all the memories she bestowed on me during the day for those weary hours before I dozed off. It was enough for me. However, Renata decided otherwise.
The shower ceased. A thick grey veil of clouds was still covering the sky. I got back to my side of the river and lit a fire to dry my clothes. It grew dark, but I could discern Renata standing there like a statue, holding on to Marishka. The windows of her cabin were glowing, smoke rose from the chimney. I thought of her mother discovering that her daughter was spending time with a hobo like me. The terror penetrating her pastoral consciousness, the notes of anxiety in her voice, when she was telling her child off for such frivolous behaviour. I should have thought of that before, Renata must have been in pain she didn’t deserve. Part of me hoped she was.
I couldn’t sleep.
Disturbed and ablaze with yearning, I tried to read grandfather’s Classical Mechanics with a torch. The sum of the momenta of the current elements is not the whole story, because there is momentum in the electromagnetic field, which will be changing in the time-dependent situation. Whatever it meant, I had read it so many times that I memorized it as if it were a poem. I wish I had a detective novel and some raki to help me dive out of this agony. I was almost ready to get out of the house and cry for the absent moon, when I heard the knocking. Two firm bangs, then a pause, then another two. Like a heartbeat. Speaking of mine, it was in my throat. I sat up in my bed, gulping, when the door creaked, and a figure entered the room. I heard water dripping on the wooden floor and shone my torch onto the intruder.
She was barefoot.
Her wet gown stuck to her thighs and belly. A globule of water hanging from the tip of the clay cross she was wearing. I pointed the torch into her face. Renata opened her mouth: my nacreous gift rested on the rose petal of her tongue. I came close to her and carefully took the pearl. One of a kind, both of them. The human in me, successful in restraining my beastly flesh for almost a month, was murdered in a sharp instant by Renata’s quiver. Instead of wrapping her in a blanket, I helped her to get rid of the soaked gown. Her shivers passed on to me. The torch fell, rolled away in a semi-circle, and our shadows appeared on a naked wall.
A year and a half later I was renting a room in Beyoğlu. I managed to sell the piece of land which belonged to my deceased grandparents, and it gave me some money to get my life back, as a street artist. I was still broke and hungry, but I was in my element again.
When not painting, I would watch people hanging around Galata Tower through the window in my friend’s café. Drinking strong coffee, one cup after another, I would listen to him humming the melody of Au Suivant, but I couldn’t agree. In my daydreams, I often imagined Renata. The taste of her skin, the way she slithered like a snake that night. Her chameleon eyes. I just couldn’t capture them in drawing and couldn’t stop trying. Renata was an itch inside my head.
Her gaze had a special kind of transparence. When she stood against the river, her eyes were the colour of its waters. When she sat next to the meadow, they would turn light green. If there was a coniferous forest behind her, it seemed I could see its emerald shimmer through them. Renata was my shelter from the ruthless mundane existence. A work of art in a monotonous book of my life. Her eyes, a flamboyant signature of her impeccable maker, Mother Nature. I couldn’t translate her onto my canvas.
I left the café to smoke a rolly on the bench near Galata. I heard two knocks. Another two. Then it got faster and louder. I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. I walked around the tower to find the source of this beating.
A teenage Turkish girl was sitting at the bottom of Galata, striking a drum. Her coily hair was covered in snow, probably the last snow of that spring. I took a closer look and almost choked with surprise. There it was, on her neck. A white precious drop on a red thread. The pearl I last saw in Renata’s mouth. I bent down to the drummer girl and asked,
‘Where did you get that pendant, kid?’
She lifted her eyes-
‘Who are you?’
‘Nobody you wanna know.’
The girl started hitting her drum harder.
‘I’m your father’s friend,’ I shouted. ‘Come on, tell me where you got it from? This thing once belonged to a very important person.’
‘My daddy left a message for you. European money can help you find the answers.’
I gave her all the cash I had. The drummer pointed at the back alley,
‘The lady who sold me this pearl went that way.’
‘Just now?’ I asked, my voice was different, alien, like it didn’t belong to me anymore.
‘Five minutes ago, look at the snow, her footprints are still there,’ she said, folding the money.
I ran in the direction following the footprints in the snow, through the narrow streets, pushing the passers-by aside, and into Istiklal Avenue. My heart was a drum. If I could only see Renata again, I would understand everything about her eyes. I would recreate them anew, and again, and again. Just the way they were. Never the same, transforming every minute. The footprints mingled with a dozen other trails on the busy street. I peered into the distance and saw a silhouette in the crowd. Wild tawny hair, airy gait, a black wool coat. I was breaking through to her, elbowing people away, screaming her name.
Why are you here? What gave you the courage to cross another river? I was getting closer, pulled ahead as if I had a hook in my throat. I stretched out my hand and tried to touch her shoulder, but I just couldn’t reach her.
‘Renata!’
She slipped further away and onto the crowded tram.
‘Renata.’
The figure turned around and looked at me through the glass.
Her eyes were milk and water.
*Isten veled (Hungarian): goodbye; God be with you.
*Anya (Hungarian): mother.
Renata lived on the other side of the river. When the dawn broke, her mother used to milk their cow and walk across the blue fir forest to sell the milk at the farmers market. The girl would be left alone. I watched her drive the cow, Marishka, into the meadow, watched her doing the laundry in the glistening waters, or gathering fallen apples into the hem of her dress. Every day I would put my grandfather’s rocking chair outside, open his book on Classical Mechanics, sit in the shade of an aspen tree and pretend to read. My sight would be tied to Renata’s collarbones. To her tawny silky curls touching her naked shoulders. At times, she lifted her head and our eyes met. Then I’d capture her gaze, as I liked to think, and she would blush, and she wouldn’t be able to look away until I stilled my hunger a little. How much beauty we can taste by mere anticipation is a miracle.
It was a month full of life. You do not get many of them. I left the frenzy of Istanbul to take refuge in the slow nurtured greenness. The contrast was striking. I could not speak for the first two days I spent in my grandparents’ bungalow. And I wouldn’t speak for the rest of twenty something days. My habits were plain, my pace primitive. I would wake up with the roosters, scratch my head, wait for the pesky birds to shut up, roll over and fall asleep again. That was my way of happy living until I met Renata.
The sun burnt my back while I was picking spring onions in my grandparents’ recently abandoned garden. The hot wind was driving me insane. I was going to add those greens to my brown bread and salt breakfast routine, to freshen it up a little. But a cheeky fly attacking my forehead became the last drop in this hellish heat torture. I slapped my face, missed it and growled. I needed to go for a swim.
The stream looked muddy, I rolled up my trousers and made a few steps into the river. Reed was cutting my legs. I went a bit further and felt the slimy shore under my feet. I decided to swim forward, though it wasn’t deep enough for a man my size. I took a breath and dived. My heartbeat slowed down. I was pulled ahead by the flow, as if I had a hook in my throat.
Followed by: the moment I saw her. In so many books you read ‘the moment I saw her’. What is so important about this first encounter? Mine was underwater. There was more than the two of us. The river, an entity ancient and alive, was bringing us together. I thought I wanted to call this girl Renata before she even told me her name.
Her eyes had this otherworldly shimmer in them. Like those beams penetrating layers of water. The cascading honey of her hair. The opalescence of her skin. Her petticoat dancing slowly, revealing her ankles. This vision, then flutter and jolts under my ribs. She smiled. My urge to ascend and breathe getting stronger by the second. She twisted around. I stayed. A few moments later I felt I didn’t need air that much. I wouldn’t drown, and even if I would… Tickling air bubbles, brought to being by her smooth motion were spreading in the water, touching my stomach, as if she touched it. Was she real? Everything went black.
A palm on my cheek, hitting it softly. I opened my eyes and saw Renata again. A sun halo embracing her head. She talked. Her voice was made of berry wine. Its sound, thirst-clenching. She was trying to explain something. Renata spoke a language I didn’t know. I was shaking for at least two reasons.
My best guess was us agreeing on me having a sunstroke, the effect of which had worsened by a contrast with the cold water I was silly enough to dive in. Renata spoke with her hands. She also pronounced strange crunchy words. The way she talked to me, a thunder and a bird thrill both in her mouth. I didn’t want to understand her, I craved for her to go on.
‘I want to show you the Galata Tower,’ I said, not knowing why.
I couldn’t afford to return there even on my own, unless I sold this shabby house along with the plot of neglected land. The idea was ridiculous, but it escaped my lips before I could stop myself. My mind was busy. Busy with the thought of her breasts. A thought of cow’s milk. Galatas. Stands for milkman.
‘Ga-la-ta,’ Renata was mocking me. The only word we shared.
‘Can I kiss you?’
What kind of a man would ask this question? You either kiss her there and then, or you hide forever behind the shed, pleasing yourself. I dragged her towards me and sucked on her lower lip. Renata smelled of dairy and wormwood. She knew nothing, but more than I would ever learn. Her bravery, her instincts. Her perfect timing. Her kisses, acts of witchery. Suffocating me with a pleasure too pure. I took her in my arms, and it felt like another sunstroke. Renata, a flawless marine animal dressed in floaty skirts. She gently pushed me away and shook her head. I failed to understand the gesture. She put her finger to her lips and gave a nod towards her log cabin. Was her mother coming home soon? I smiled at her, touched her nose, turned around and jumped into the river. While I was crossing it, I didn’t think of anything. The silence in me engrossed the silence around me.
I had been watching her from afar every morning since the dive. I would wake up with Renata on my mind and go to sleep hoping to see her again the next day. Sometimes I would swim to the other shore and sit on a stump near her cabin. If I was lucky, she would approach me with a mug of fresh milk and a piece of bread.
In the calmness of the noon I would touch her knee through the cotton and get a light slap in the face. The moment after, Renata would laugh and run her fingers through my hair. We would sit together sharing bread soaked in milk. Once she dropped her slice and I caught it. I ate the half and I fed the other half to Renata. Milk was running down her chin. She wiped it with her apron, glanced at me as if she was embarrassed and cast her eyes down.
‘I surrender,’ I said. ‘You’re a torment.’
My words, meaningless sounds to my Renata.
Often, I’d try to tell her a story, swing my arms around, make funny noise. And this girl would laugh, showing her pink gums, the skin on her nose would scrunch up and the little stars of freckles would collide. I thought of her body as a universe of its own. The Milky Way etched onto her skin. Did she have those freckles everywhere?
Day by day, I was observing the slow changes in her. At first, she was curious. She kept on listening to me and pushed me with her elbow if I stopped entertaining her. Though my language was obscure to Renata, our conversations amused her.
We learned each other’s ‘swim’, ‘milk’, ‘mama’ and ‘goodbye’, and it was enough. A bountiful vocabulary for those living in Eden.
Then, she became cautious.
The closer I sat to her, the quieter she’d get. The longer I held her hand, the heavier her breathing. I would swim across the river and rush to her log cabin after her mother’s departure, but Renata wouldn’t care to meet me halfway as she’d done before.
It rained pitchforks, and the heavy clouds blended with the raw iron of storm water, when Renata pressed her palm to my face, and I understood I was no longer welcome on her shore.
‘Anya,’ she said, sighing.
Isten veled*. I saw her mother driving the cow back home from the pasture. She was in distress and shouted something about the milk to us. I assumed Renata revealed to her that we were seeing each other, and that she let me kiss her knuckles and tickle her toes. Of course, her anya* came to the conclusion that I was going to ‘spoil’ her girl. It was time for me to depart, before it all went too far.
I outstretched my hand giving Renata the white teardrop pearl I had found in my grandmother’s jewelry box. Rain filled my palm. I opened it and the pearl slipped through my fingers with the water. Renata’s face was split in two by a flash of lightning. For a second I thought I saw the anger in her, and then it transformed into sheer desperation. She turned away from me and walked up the path to her cabin.
I never treated anyone with such care. I was afraid to ruin her just as much as I wanted to. You can’t pour water into a broken pitcher. I chose this pitcher to be saved from my clumsy hands. I knew better than that. I could just feast my eyes on her. Enjoy the richness of her reactions, imagine her arching her back on my sheets. I could dissolve in serenity whenever we were sitting close enough to share our breaths, savor all the memories she bestowed on me during the day for those weary hours before I dozed off. It was enough for me. However, Renata decided otherwise.
The shower ceased. A thick grey veil of clouds was still covering the sky. I got back to my side of the river and lit a fire to dry my clothes. It grew dark, but I could discern Renata standing there like a statue, holding on to Marishka. The windows of her cabin were glowing, smoke rose from the chimney. I thought of her mother discovering that her daughter was spending time with a hobo like me. The terror penetrating her pastoral consciousness, the notes of anxiety in her voice, when she was telling her child off for such frivolous behaviour. I should have thought of that before, Renata must have been in pain she didn’t deserve. Part of me hoped she was.
I couldn’t sleep.
Disturbed and ablaze with yearning, I tried to read grandfather’s Classical Mechanics with a torch. The sum of the momenta of the current elements is not the whole story, because there is momentum in the electromagnetic field, which will be changing in the time-dependent situation. Whatever it meant, I had read it so many times that I memorized it as if it were a poem. I wish I had a detective novel and some raki to help me dive out of this agony. I was almost ready to get out of the house and cry for the absent moon, when I heard the knocking. Two firm bangs, then a pause, then another two. Like a heartbeat. Speaking of mine, it was in my throat. I sat up in my bed, gulping, when the door creaked, and a figure entered the room. I heard water dripping on the wooden floor and shone my torch onto the intruder.
She was barefoot.
Her wet gown stuck to her thighs and belly. A globule of water hanging from the tip of the clay cross she was wearing. I pointed the torch into her face. Renata opened her mouth: my nacreous gift rested on the rose petal of her tongue. I came close to her and carefully took the pearl. One of a kind, both of them. The human in me, successful in restraining my beastly flesh for almost a month, was murdered in a sharp instant by Renata’s quiver. Instead of wrapping her in a blanket, I helped her to get rid of the soaked gown. Her shivers passed on to me. The torch fell, rolled away in a semi-circle, and our shadows appeared on a naked wall.
A year and a half later I was renting a room in Beyoğlu. I managed to sell the piece of land which belonged to my deceased grandparents, and it gave me some money to get my life back, as a street artist. I was still broke and hungry, but I was in my element again.
When not painting, I would watch people hanging around Galata Tower through the window in my friend’s café. Drinking strong coffee, one cup after another, I would listen to him humming the melody of Au Suivant, but I couldn’t agree. In my daydreams, I often imagined Renata. The taste of her skin, the way she slithered like a snake that night. Her chameleon eyes. I just couldn’t capture them in drawing and couldn’t stop trying. Renata was an itch inside my head.
Her gaze had a special kind of transparence. When she stood against the river, her eyes were the colour of its waters. When she sat next to the meadow, they would turn light green. If there was a coniferous forest behind her, it seemed I could see its emerald shimmer through them. Renata was my shelter from the ruthless mundane existence. A work of art in a monotonous book of my life. Her eyes, a flamboyant signature of her impeccable maker, Mother Nature. I couldn’t translate her onto my canvas.
I left the café to smoke a rolly on the bench near Galata. I heard two knocks. Another two. Then it got faster and louder. I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. I walked around the tower to find the source of this beating.
A teenage Turkish girl was sitting at the bottom of Galata, striking a drum. Her coily hair was covered in snow, probably the last snow of that spring. I took a closer look and almost choked with surprise. There it was, on her neck. A white precious drop on a red thread. The pearl I last saw in Renata’s mouth. I bent down to the drummer girl and asked,
‘Where did you get that pendant, kid?’
She lifted her eyes-
‘Who are you?’
‘Nobody you wanna know.’
The girl started hitting her drum harder.
‘I’m your father’s friend,’ I shouted. ‘Come on, tell me where you got it from? This thing once belonged to a very important person.’
‘My daddy left a message for you. European money can help you find the answers.’
I gave her all the cash I had. The drummer pointed at the back alley,
‘The lady who sold me this pearl went that way.’
‘Just now?’ I asked, my voice was different, alien, like it didn’t belong to me anymore.
‘Five minutes ago, look at the snow, her footprints are still there,’ she said, folding the money.
I ran in the direction following the footprints in the snow, through the narrow streets, pushing the passers-by aside, and into Istiklal Avenue. My heart was a drum. If I could only see Renata again, I would understand everything about her eyes. I would recreate them anew, and again, and again. Just the way they were. Never the same, transforming every minute. The footprints mingled with a dozen other trails on the busy street. I peered into the distance and saw a silhouette in the crowd. Wild tawny hair, airy gait, a black wool coat. I was breaking through to her, elbowing people away, screaming her name.
Why are you here? What gave you the courage to cross another river? I was getting closer, pulled ahead as if I had a hook in my throat. I stretched out my hand and tried to touch her shoulder, but I just couldn’t reach her.
‘Renata!’
She slipped further away and onto the crowded tram.
‘Renata.’
The figure turned around and looked at me through the glass.
Her eyes were milk and water.
*Isten veled (Hungarian): goodbye; God be with you.
*Anya (Hungarian): mother.
Polina Cosgrave is a bilingual writer/performer based in Dublin. Polina’s debut poetry collection ‘My Name Is’ was published by Dedalus Press. Her work appeared on TV, radio and in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The Stinging Fly, Crannóg, Southword, Banshee and The Irish Times. Her poem 'Every Immigrant's Dream’ is featured in Poetry Day Ireland 2023 Pocket Poems initiative. Polina's film 'Currency Exchange' has been selected for this year's Irish Poetry-Film screening at the Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer poetry festival.
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