As Soldiers March, Alfonso Covers the Boy’s Face with a Newspaper

← v19n2, Fall 2020

Fourteen people, most of us strangers,

watch Sonya kneel by Petya

shot in the middle of the street.

She picks up his spectacles shining like two coins, balances them on his nose.

Observe this moment

—how it convulses—

Snow falls and the dogs run into the streets like medics.

Fourteen of us watch:

Sonya kisses his forehead—her shout a hole

torn in the sky, it shimmers the park benches, porchlights.

We see in Sonya’s open mouth

the nakedness

of a whole nation.

She stretches out

beside the little snowman napping in the middle of the street.

As picking up its belly the country runs.

war violence grief

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky is the winner of the 2020 Levis Reading Prize for his poetry collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019). The prize is awarded annually for the best first or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year and chosen by the Department of English and its MFA in creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), and has co-edited and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books, 2012). He is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The National Jewish Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, Lannan Fellowship, Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).