There will come a time when some bastard / will surely write heroic poems about this.
You don’t have to look at the videos of the bodies in the streets to know that there are bodies in the streets, or to know why they are lying there, why it has gotten to this.
We are talking about Ukraine and Bucha and some of us are also talking about everything all at once, at the same time.
Boycott the oppression olympics and acknowledge instead the unceasing marathon of suffering.
When there’s this much pain to go around the competition for tragedy feels infinitely self-defeating. (When there’s this much pain going around, celebrating joy feels like a miracle)
If we can contain multitudes, if we might choose to care about multiple things at once, we could also equally acknowledge the structural inequity of attention.
(Hold fast to the people who help you get through this and every other this before and after)
Attribution:
Someone said they shot him at a roadblock
in the morning, a weapon in his hands, somehow by accident –
No one knew what happened.
They buried him in a mass grave (they buried them all that way).
His possessions were returned to his parents.
Nobody updated his status.
There will come a time when some bastard
will surely write heroic poems about this
There will come a time when some other bastard
will say this isn’t worth writing about.
— from Needle by Serhiy Zhadan translated by Amelia Mukamel Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk