Iya Kiva — [a frozen sea]
Iya Kiva (1984–) was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and is a renowned poet, translator, and journalist. Her collections of poetry include: Further from Heaven (2018), written in Russian and Ukrainian, and The First Page of Winter (2019), in Ukrainian. Kiva has also published a collection of interviews with contemporary Belarusian writers about the protests in 2020-2021 – Will Wake Up to Others: Conversations with Contemporary Belarusian Writers on the Past, Present and Future of Belarus (2021). In 2014, after the outbreak of Russian military invasion, she relocated to Kyiv, and later, in 2022, to Lviv. During this time, she began to write only in the Ukrainian language. Her poetry has broaches themes of dislocation, or severance from ideas of home, community, body, and self in the aftermath of violence and war.
Excerpt:
a frozen sea of people rolls stones around its mouth
this dead language of a time we’ll turn to
when the wind cuts life’s thread like a flower
and weaves it into a long night of forgetting
the dead say: we sought homes like light
but couldn’t find them, and the earth seated us at its table,
and now each day we eat the dirty music of silence
dark flashes of memory passing from mouth to mouth
the dead say: fighting for memory is for the living
while we grasp gravestone inscriptions
like trees grasping air with dried up roots
though they sting children’s palms like snakes
the dead say: everything we knew has grown strange
our streets have followed us underground
and now we can’t leave history’s ghetto
for our past is dead, poisonous water
the dead say: the living drink hope from our bones but
we lost the seeds of hope along the way they stick tall
in our throats and hide their eyes like the heavy stones
the living hold under their tongues
Ukrainian poet Iya Kiva’s [a frozen sea] (2022) draws upon the littoral space as an embodiment of the unlimited, a depository of memory, and site of revelation to the often dark and frightening unknown. This poem is built around the image of a frozen sea – one that fragments into a powerful illustration of the ‘freezing’, or dislocating experience of war (particularly the Russian full-scale military invasion), and attempt to escape, or make sense of, a painful collective past: “and now we can’t leave history’s ghetto/ for our past is dead, poisonous water.”
Citation: trans. Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, August 2025, https://www.londonukrainianreview.org/translates/kiva-a-frozen-sea
Original Text: Ківа І. «перекочує в роті каміння застигле море людей...» // Посестри. Часопис. 2022. № 25