Borys Humenyuk🇺🇦 Ukrainian writer, poet, soldier. Member of the National Writers' Union of Ukraine since 2006. His works are not in the Project Nedopysani because he has been MIA since Dec. 2022.
Read his "Zapovit" ("Last Will") that I translated into English:
Today, we dig the earth again,
This hateful Donetsk earth,
This hardened, unyielding earth.
We shelter behind the earth,
Like little children behind their mother’s back.
We hear its heart beating,
Tomorrow, we will be dead.
Do not take us from the earth,
Do not tear us from our mother.
Do not collect our remains from the battlefield,
Do not try to piece us back together.
No crosses, no memorials, no stone plaques.
They are not for us—they are for you,
The grand monuments you build in our name.
Do not carve our names anywhere.
Do not return us to our parents.
We do not want them to see us like this.
Let them remember us as children,
With slingshots and bruised knees,
With bad grades in school,
With pockets full of apples from a neighbor’s tree.
Let them hope we will come home one day,
That somewhere, somehow, we still exist.
Do not return us to our wives.
Let them remember us as handsome men,
The ones many girls liked,
But who belonged to them alone.
Let them remember our burning lips,
Let them not touch our cold foreheads,
Do not return us to our children.
Let them remember our warm eyes,
Let their trembling lips never touch
Which today are our shelter
And tomorrow will be our graves—
In the silence after battle,
They always seem misplaced,
Like shaking a fallen soldier
We already know where our resting place will be.
Just cover us with earth,
It would be good if a field grew there,
If the rye swayed in the wind,
If a lark sang in the sky,
Can you imagine what kind of bread will grow
On a field where soldiers lie?!
(In our memory, eat the bread from the fields
It would be good if there were meadows,
If in the evening, lovers came,
If during the day, young parents
Came with their children.
(Do not stop the children from coming to us.)
But that will be tomorrow.
Today, we are still digging the earth,
This dear Ukrainian earth,
This sweet, gentle earth,
Writing together, with our entrenching tools,
The last poem of Ukrainian literature.
(Project Nedopysani - i.e. Project Unfinished Writing Works - is a volunteer project that collects works of Ukrainian writers and poets that died in Russia's war against Ukraine. Most of those writers have not yet been recognized or even published anything yet. So they become known only after they are KIA - when their relatives or comrades pass their writing notes to volunteers who run the Project Nedopysani. The Project was created to forestall something that has been happening for centuries when Russians attacked Ukrainian lands before, murdering the indigenous population and burning and destroying all works in Ukrainian language - thousands of Ukrainian artists and writers and their works lost to history)
Listen to the work in Ukrainian, read by Borys Humenyuk:
dededos
andulkaphoto
turnnoffyourmind
2087
snowghoul
stormborns
