Addressing a Foreign World | David Dephy

Take Your Sandals Off Your Feet

You are in Ukraine, take off your sandals, 
for the place where you are standing 
is holy and the air you are breathing is holy,
touching rays on your face,
drifting through the noise of madness
from the other side of the dark,
still, the lips touch the air 
and this body is a foreign language 
addressing a foreign world,
and its foreign skies. I say, 
take a deep breath, my love, 
let us embrace this great void as an old friend, 
perhaps then we shall discover each other 
far on the other side of alone.
Have you heard a song of braves?
Take your sandals off your feet, 
the place when you’re standing is holy,
every grain is the heart of a child, 
the grain of truth—
breathing through the golden shadows.
Have you heard the laughs and smells?
This is the greatest afternoon of freedom.

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Love Song of Rays

See the rays over there? Did you hear songs? 
Yes, songs from the frontline? Mariupol. 
The pearl encircled by rays. 

Muscovites hate the rays, ray means freedom, 
they don’t understand freedom, they hate themselves,
that’s why they hate the world, hiding faces in the dark. 

“This is the end, beautiful friend,” remember?
We need victory, over the spiritless corps, 
not just a peace—

peace is a luxury, as this second is one more 
deadly breath of time, we do not have much time 
for peace, we have time only for victory.

Even shadows shake when mother’s voice 
echoes from far beyond. How can you say peace 
should give you comfort? Peace does not dwell 

on the other side of war, but victory. 
Maybe there is no peace in the world, 
that’s why we should win. 

See the voices of kids how colored the ground?
Each thing born from those rays is our hope. 
Who can succeed with all those rays, 

full of those voices? Rays blow through the blood.
Who would like to dictate to you?
Who among us is right? Most valuable?

Who most resembles God? Have you ever seen God?
Touch the rays in Mariupol and you will see.
If there is peace deep in the ground, 

it should feel the fear and joy, 
If there is peace it should be a memory,
but memory is not powerful enough, 

is not beautiful at all, never forget we are free, 
that’s why we can see the rays. 
We can smell the rays, touch them 
with every beat of our hearts.
We are dying, we are living, not complaining, 
we touched each other with our hearts

because we were born in the hearts of each other,
because we required life, because we all are in the war.
Touch the rays. Peace.

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96 Year-Old Man

I was standing alone in front of the stillness 
of March, not expecting the flow of memories.We are living without love, that’s why the war

can’t be measured by history, by ashes, by art.
Without today we breathe between yesterday 
and tomorrow. Do you know something about time?

About time, yes, and its insanity?  
Do you know something about yourself?
About me? How I lived? How I loved? 

What I did? Maybe you can predict future? 
Time should have some meaning for you.
For me it’s insanity. 

I felt history’s neurasthenia in that very afternoon 
when I was standing in front of the stillness of March
and not expecting the flow of seconds. Nerves of time.

I understood and I did not expect to be alive,
time is meaningless and it’s suppressing us. 
I didn't expect to feel that deadly second again,

in emptiness, but my heart was able to beat again, 
my heart is remembering, after centuries, 
how to beat again in the frozen silence of fears, 

war, in the raw, 
cold breeze of the laughs 
and howl.

96 year-old man. 
Mr. Romanchenko. 
Survived the concentration camps: 
Buchenwald, 
Peenemünde, 
Mittelbau-Dora, 
Bergen-Belsen. 
Yesterday he was killed 
by the Russian missile 
hitting his apartment building in Kharkiv. 

Russia, the "denazifier," 
did what the Nazis 
couldn't do.

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Poems ©2022 David Delphy
All rights reserved

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