Poetry

Unknown

This speaker is less a person than a pressure gauge for Ukraine's grief, slipping into the masks of a girl waiting for a drowned lover, a nun cursing her stolen youth, and a prophet tearing icons from church walls. The recurring ache is abandonment—by a lover, by God, by history—and the recurring answer is defiant tenderness, as when she vows to bloom as a red viburnum over a grave so strangers cannot trample it. These voices set the book's emotional register: intimate loss scaled up into national lament.

The Servant

Anna moves through the farm as its invisible hinge—bathing the child Mark, sewing, singing, weeping alone at night while the family sleeps. Everyone treats her as a servant, yet her care for Mark exceeds duty, and when his wedding approaches she flees to Kiev on pilgrimage rather than sit in the mother's chair. Her buried claim on him turns every small kindness into quiet agony, and the household's cheerful arrangements press steadily toward the moment her silence can no longer hold.

Mark

Mark is the household's hope: he hauls ox-teams to Crimea for salt and cloth, brings Katherine rich fabric and Anna a lace-trimmed bonnet, and sings on the road home while sorrow gathers ahead of him. His goodness is uncomplicated, which is exactly what makes him vulnerable—he loves the servant Anna as a second mother without knowing why she weeps. His homecoming collides with her deathbed confession, and the poem turns on whether a son can absorb a truth that arrives only as she stops breathing.

Katherine

Katherine is the household's steady warmth—nursing the sick woman through nights without sleep, running to meet Mark's oxen, praying as if in a dream when he finally appears. She loves generously and is loved in return, but the dying servant asks her to leave before the confession, placing her outside a secret that concerns her marriage. Her grace under that exclusion, and her role as the bridge between Mark and the home he returns to, make her the quiet moral center of the poem's middle movement.

The Cossack

He sits above Traktemir watching the sun set over a Ukraine he can no longer recognize, remembering when Cossack churches waited for warriors from the Delta and the Zaporogues held the steppe. His grief curdles into bitter speech—against the Poles, the squabbling officers, even against Christ for changing a people God made—yet he pulls back from cursing the sacred hills themselves. He is the book's memory made flesh, a man whose love for the land is so total he'd risk his soul for it, and whose lament frames the loss the other poems circle.

Trophimus

Trophimus is the household's surviving patriarch—grieving 'Stasia, then throwing himself into wedding preparations with kegs of home-brew and a joy that nearly outruns his old legs. He clings to the servant Anna as a substitute mother for Mark, pleading with her to stay, and reads her refusal as a slight he cannot parse. His blundering cheer against her hidden sorrow gives the poem its cruelest irony: a father celebrating a marriage while the woman who raised his son quietly leaves to die.