From: "A Kingdom of Fallen Statues"
Poems and Essays by Oksana Zabushko
Wellspring, Ltd.
Toronto, Canada
1996, Page 42

It could be dawn.
The light crumpled like sheets.
The ashtray full.
A shadow multiplies on four walls.
The room is empty.
No witnesses.
But someone was here.
A moment ago twin tears shimmered
On polished wood.
(Did a couple live here?)
In the armchair a suit, recently filled by a body,
Has collapsed into a bolt of fabric.
Come in, look around. No one's here,
Just the breathing air, crushed
As though by a tank.
A half-finished sweater remembers someone's fingers.
A book lies open, marked by a fingernail.
(How amazing, this silence beyond the boundary!)
On the polished wood, two stains.
On the floor by the armchair an apple,
Bitten but not brown.

(Note: Prypiat is an abandoned town in the evacuated area around Chornobyl)

Biographical Notes:
  
Born in Lutsk in 1960, Oksana Zabuzhko graduated from the department of philosophy at Kyiv Shevchenko University in 1982 and received a doctoral degree in aesthetics 1987. Since then she has been an associate of the Institute of Philosophy at the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kyiv. She taught Ukrainian culture and literature as a writer-in-residence at Pennsylvania State University in 1992 and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University and the University of Pittsburgh in 1994.

Oksana Zabuzhko is the author of three collections of poetry: "May Hoarfrost", "The Conductor of the Last Candle", and "Hitchhiking," She has also translated the poetry of Sylvia Plath into Ukrainian. Her fiction includes two short novels, "Extraterrestrial Woman" and the best-selling "Field Studies in Ukrainian Sex", for which she received several awards. As a scholar, Zabuzhko has published "Two Cultures, The Philosophy of the Ukrainian Idea and Its European Context", and a number of literary and cultural essays.