A Kyivan Elegy – Babyn Yar

Does everyone talk to the dead so readily in this city? There’s a ravine here where thousands were buried, scores of thousands. I went there twice. Once in summer when the pansies (or potato flowers) were in bloom. I prefer to think of them as pansies – thoughts. Another time, in the autumn rain, on the anniversary of the massacre. During the commemoration held outside, under a tent, near the synagogue, sirens blared just before a drone was shot down in the distance. No one paused their public prayers.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. I’ve heard this place described as grim, but for me it epitomizes the city’s strange angelic beauty. Presences. Delivering their judgement on history’s sublime burgeoning through rubble and ash. Intelligences assuming their invisible place in the scheme of things long abandoned – first as unintelligible, then as obsolete, ultimately as nothing. These presences, they haunt so sweetly here. I know I’m not the only outsider to Kyiv who feels it. The dead here hold a special place. Not at all like in Egypt, where the pharaohs clung to their possessions under limestone and granite. Here they’re more like motes of dust you only see floating in a shaft of light. They swarm. Things swarm here. Soon the world will recognize this flat land as the place where swarms came of age – as machines. A dead friend said: I’m so in my element here. Everywhere else seems flat. Other Topics of Interest ‘Science Became a Target’: Europe Condemns Russian Strikes on Kyiv Civilian Sites European leaders condemned Russian attacks on Kyiv that hit the National Academy of Sciences, a medical center and other civilian sites. This is a place where prayer has been valid – and only apparently futile. Because the dead here tell you what they had no speech for while living. They shower you under litanies tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. Here, the intersection of hell and that state removed from space-time is Ukraine and nowhere. Never again and unceasing. Now the dead have learned how to enter us through screens – flat screens I assume will increase their dimensions, add depth to this dehumanizing journey. We sit and summon them in our comfort, absorb their instructions, steep in the ease they afford us. But no one says we’re bound to stay grounded. It’s just easier: sitting in a chair, or lying on a bed, and flying to another place that exists now only as recorded or broadcast image. I’ve almost forgotten how to fly. But instead of soaring, I watch the building burn on a screen. I can’t even smell the flames – yet. It took a while to let our angels go – generations, centuries in some cases (though time belies the whole process) – but once we stopped seeing the air they stir and hearing their whispers, they flooded into our screens, keeping us glued to foggy dreams. I see them now as motes groping for that shaft of light that will make them visible in this epoch of wet clay. Envoys of a terrible beauty being born. I summon them, these angels – my angels, since so few are willing to carry their message. Stash Luczkiw is a US-born, European-based writer, translator and features editor for Kyiv Post.