Nocturne for a Moving Train
by Valzhyna Mort
The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window
of a night train were
the saddest trees.
They seemed about to speak,
then –
vanished like soldiers.
The hostesses handed out starched linens for sleep.
Passengers bent over small icons
of sandwiches.
In a tall glass, a spoon mixed sugar into coffee
banging its silver face against the facets.
The window reflected back a figure
struggling with white sheets.
The posts with names of towns promised
a possibility of words
for what flew by.
In lit-up windows people seemed to move
as if performing surgery on tables.
Chestnut parks sighed the sighs of creatures
capable of speech.
Radiation, an etymology of soil
directed into the future, prepared
a thesis on the new origins of old roots,
on secret, disfiguring missions of misspellings,
on the shocking betrayal of apples,
on the uncompromised loyalty of cesium.
My childish voice, my hands, my feet – all my things that live
on the edges of me –
shhh now, the chestnut parks are about to speak.
But now they’ve vanished.
I was extracted from my apartment block,
chained to the earth with iron playgrounds,
where iron swings rose like oil wells,
I was extracted before I could dig a language
out of air
with my childish feet.
I was extracted by beaks – storks, cranes.
See, the conductor punching out eyes
of sleeping passengers.
What is it about my face
that turns it into a document,
into a ticket stretched out by a neck?
Why does unfolding this starch bedding
feel like
skinning someone invisible?
Why can’t the spoons, head-down in glasses, stop screaming?
Shhh…
The chestnuts are about to speak.
Reproduced with kind permission of The Poetry Review.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Single Poem 2020
Music for the Dead and Resurrected
Valzhyna Mort
About Valzhyna Mort
Valzhyna Mort (b. 1981, Minsk) moved to the United States in 2005 and teaches at Cornell University. ‘Nocturne for a Moving Train’ (set on a Belarusian night-train travelling from Minsk to Warsaw or Berlin) paints an unsettling portrait of an interior and exterior landscape; fugitive glimpses of places passed through, windows in which figures are seen to move ‘as if performing surgery on tables’. Reflections multiply; signboards promise ‘a possibility of words / for what flew by’; the landscape itself is on the edge of speech.
Mort has received the Crystal of Valencia Award, the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors, and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry (Chicago). Her third collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected – which she has described as ‘a book of letters to the dead’ – is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Read Valzhnya Mort’s article “My Country is Under Attack” in The New York Times.
Read “The World Hears You: Vlazhnya Mort describes Belarus in August 2020.”
Hear Valzhyna Mort talk about languages in Guardian Books Podcast.
