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Poem: "1933" (an excerpt)
By Oleksa Veretenchenko
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"My paupered Ukrainian people Ukraine, my Sich mother Where are your coats of arms and heirlooms? Where is your state mace? Long has the steppe not heard the cry of the eagle aloft. The fame of Khmelnyts'kyi and Mazepa is not sung about by grey kobzars. Only the pounding of chains can be heard in Solovky, in Siberia, in Kolyma. The cossack country of hetmans is dying in Russian slavery.
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Where has the joyful smiling gone, and the Kupalo fires of girls? Where are the Ukrainian villages, and the cherry orchards around the houses? Everything has perished in the cold blazes: mothers and children are dying of hunger, and madmen in bazaars sell human flesh to people. Everything has disappeared...and on all of the ruins our drunken enemies dance, Ukrainians die in Ukraine, In Baikol, in the cold of the taiga... No - we will not rise like a cloud, No - we will not strike like a thunderbolt If a punishment is due for all crimes, then what kind of punishment is due them?"
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Dmytro Chob says, "The poet Oleksa Veretenchenko escaped from a German encirclement (during the Second World War) returned to Kharkiv, and wrote two deeply resonant poems. I quote an excerpt from one of them, from memory (see above)."
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Poem printed in the article, "Echoes
of the Great Famine in the Memoirs of Eyewitnesses and in Ukrainian Literature", by Dmytro Chob. The Great Famine In Ukraine 1932-1933 Pages 129-130 The Ukrainian Orthodox Brotherhood of St. Volodymyr Toronto, Canada 1988 |
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