Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
Podillia
Translated from the Ukrainian by Askold Melnyczuk
From braids of wheat, bread grows,
Its long moustaches dripping dew
Twirled by the sun’s gold fingers;
Buckwheat honey leaves us drunk.
Scythe and sheaf,
And rows of bales receding in the distance;
Ploughed to clumps of grief,
Black, humid earth on its knees
While wind quietly shreds what’s left of a border of bluebells.
Rain and rain.
A cuff of small tears clamps the hours.
A key of cranes chases the sun.
Each night, in the yews, autumn creaks
While days of summer amble emptily
Down distant, unpaved roads.
—August 17, 1939
Olena Zahajkewycz was born in Laskivci, Ukraine, and now lives in New Jersey.
Askold Melnyczuk is founding editor of AGNI.
Askold Melnyczuk—the founding editor of AGNI, for which he received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing—is the author of four novels and a book of stories. What Is Told (Faber, 1994), was the first commercially published work of fiction in English to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. Other novels have been selected as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. His most recent book is a collection of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow. His selected poems, The Venus of Odesa, is forthcoming from Mad Hat in summer 2025. A book of selected nonfiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever), will be published by Harvard University Press in 2026. He has edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel Prize–winning poet Derek Walcott and is coeditor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation. He's the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award for fiction, the Heldt Prize for translation, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his work in the literary community. Individual poems, stories, essays, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Also the founder of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, and Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. (updated 5/2025)