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Iryna Vikyrchak
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21st century Europe friendship starts in the small hours, coinciding with air raid alerts. I open my eyes to check cities under attack today quickly listing my friends in them. 21st century Europe wartime friendship is keeping your friends in prayers, holding them by the hand in thought, what else can you do from your safety? Sending short messages how are you? how’s your cat? how’s your dog? and your kids, have you managed to get them to safety?” While they, my dear brave friends, stay in bathrooms for hours - the most secure room in their flat, they say, according to the principle of double walls (the first one takes the missile, the second – debris). Holding cats, dogs, children responding in monosyllables – fine or blanks - it must have hit nearby. I am holding to our common memories tightly and to those we still have to make. Please not you, not today Olia in Dnipro Ania in Odessa Yulia in Kharkiv Luckily I have no one in Mariupol luckily otherwise my heart would blow up it is not big enough to ever contain Mariupol. |
Iryna Vikyrchak is a Ukrainian culture manager and poet. She directed and curated numerous literary festivals and events in Ukraine and Europe. She’s also worked as head of the National Desk of Creative Europe in Ukraine (2016-2017) and as assistant to Nobel Prize Laureate Olga Tokarczuk (2019-2021). She’s the author of three poetry collections, of which the latest, Algometria, was published in Kyiv in 2021. She is a member of PEN-Ukraine and is a PhD student at Wroclaw University in Poland. She writes in Ukrainian and English. |
