Hope was a thing with pink feathers
circling Olympic ice.
Despite her tender years,
a woman of great composure.
Circling Olympic ice for gold,
Ukraine! We could hardly believe our ears:
This woman of great composure,
triple Lutz-flip-loop world premiere.
Ukraine! (We could hardly believe our ears)
representing the once orphaned and lost…
With a triple Lutz-flip-loop world premiere,
How much could one girl cost?
Representing the once orphaned and lost,
a dash of Broadway thrown in for good cheer.
How much could one girl cost?
Kerrigan, steely—no fame fetters yet or fear.
A little Broadway never hurt a routine—
Then: gold! Oksana cried and cried and cried.
Kerrigan gauged her steely dream:
It’s taking twenty minutes for officials to find…
Oksana cried and cried and cried—let’s say, triple-cried.
Post Soviet tears no longer held to ransom.
It took twenty minutes for Olympic officials to find
Ukraine’s national anthem.
As Nancy Kerrigan’s eyes demanded ransom,
her Vera Wang swan about to be pronounced dead,
still no copy of Ukraine’s national anthem—
maybe they’d play Russia’s instead.
No flowers, swans or poppies red,
at home, we held our breath.
Maybe they’d fly Russia’s eagle instead.
But damn, this gold was our destined wealth.
At home, we waited, held our breath.
Where was our anthem, the homeland tether?
Slava Boha..! this could be our wealth.
Our hope was a thing with pink feathers.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is Pushcart prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She’s published six full-length poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including her most recent, Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones (2009) for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was selected by Robert Pinsky as the 2019 co-winner of the New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize. In 2014, Dialogos published Jeff Friedman’s and her co-translation of Memorials: A Selection by Polish poet Mieczysław Jastrun for which she and Friedman were awarded a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, (Lost Horse Press), was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s National Translation Book Award in Poetry, and winner of the 2020-2021 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize. Her and Ali’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2024 and her new poetry collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in fall, 2024. Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine, founding director of Night Riffs: A Solstice Literary Magazine Reading and Music Series. and Poet-in-Residence at the Solstice MFA Program for Creative Writing.
