There is no place in the world today where poetry matters more than in Ukraine.

Years ago, when I was in my 20s and living in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC, I came upon an imposing statue of a man dressed in a frock coat and a scarf, windswept and striding forward, as if he was about to step off his pedestal; a very Romantic image. “TARAS SHEVCHENKO BARD OF UKRAINE” is chiseled into the stone beneath his feet.

I didn’t know anything about this man, and gave his monument little thought—except for the occasional gibe among my chums, who were flippant and profane twenty-somethings like me, and who would sometimes burst out in conversation for no reason, “Taras Shevchenko, Bard of Ukraine!” What fools we were.

Now, decades later, that monument has become a scene of reverence and defiance. Shevchenko is Ukraine’s national poet. And what my friends and I did not understand was why—why a poet stood there at all in tidy Dupont Circle, why Ukrainian émigrés had gathered at that statue for decades during the Cold War.

They, and many Americans of many different backgrounds, are gathering there again in these dark days for Ukraine, holding demonstrations for the freedom of a country that, when Shevchenko wrote, officially did not exist. Vladimir Putin wants to disappear that nation into the shadows of Muscovite tyranny once again.

Americans erect statues to generals and presidents. Ukrainians erected one to a poet.

Years later, in Kyiv, I visited Shevchenko’s small house, now a museum, and I did begin to understand. For long stretches of its history Ukraine possessed neither sovereignty nor secure borders. What it possessed was language. Poetry carried the national memory, the national soul, when institutions failed.

In 2022, in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I met a young woman working in a secret location somewhere in Kyiv. Just a few weeks earlier she had worked in an art gallery and written poems. Now she was organizing rifles and handguns and ammunition—much of it sent in small boxes from the US and Canada by ordinary gun owners inspired by Ukraine’s struggle—and she was getting these armaments, such as they were, loaded into vans bound for the front. She laughed at the improbability of it all—how suddenly life had changed. Her eyes were bright then, alive with urgency and disbelief. And fierce determination.

What struck me when we talked was not only her fierceness and her bright eyes. It was something she said. I don’t remember it verbatim, but it was this thought, this feeling: “My work is the same, I think. The same work by other means.” The art gallery. The weapons and the vans. Before, she helped preserve her country’s culture. Now she helped preserve the country itself.

Since 2022, I’ve often wondered about that young woman in that cold warehouse. The risks she was taking. The risks they all take, now, every day. The horizons have narrowed in Ukraine. Survival has become the organizing principle of national life. It is a changed society: exhaustion, demographic loss, families scattered across borders, a normalization of grief. Among the many truths Ukrainians have discovered and exposed in the years of this war for national survival is that countries can become very strong and very tired at the same time.

In Ukraine today, poetry is not a retreat from reality. It is one way of defending it.

One of the facts of this war is that Ukraine has produced an extraordinary outpouring of poetry while they are fighting it, and much of that poetry has been translated quickly into English precisely because the writers and translators understood that poetry itself is part of the struggle.

One of the lessons I’ve learned over the years—covering wars, elections, and the slow erosion of democratic norms—is that democracy doesn’t usually collapse all at once. It weakens when citizens lose the habit of paying close attention. When we stop asking basic questions: What’s true? What’s missing? Who benefits from this version of events?

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Halyna Kruk is a leading Ukrainian writer and translator. In 2022, she gave an extraordinary speech to a conference in Berlin. She was, like the woman I met loading arms in Kyiv, already seeing how her literary work was part of her country’s fight.

“I don’t know any poetry that could heal this wound,” Kruk said. “This war is killing us all, each in their own way: though we may look safe and sound, we can’t but get through life in brief dashes. We startle from loud sounds. Our little kids have a background in hiding from bombardments, and they no longer cry out of fear. In their childhood, they have already learnt that a cry can cost their lives. And this is still not a metaphor.”

That was almost four years ago. Kruk closed her remarks with this line:

“I wish that poetry could really kill.”

So today let us listen to two voices from Ukraine. A country where writers read during air raids, where poets serve as soldiers and medics, and where language itself has become a form of resistance—a way of insisting that a people, and their memory, will endure.

—Terry

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIn the village, we kids picked flowersfor the mass grave

colorful fragrant weedsblossoming reeds and grasses

All the schoolchildrenwere locked in the school that day

Huddling around cow dung cakeswe made small fires

didn’t entrust to adultsour wild ghost stories

Nothing remained of the schoolbut a mossy outline

I tried to learn their namesthere were too many

someone stands between you and death — butwho knows how much more my heart can stand —where you are, it’s so importantsomeone prays for youeven with their own wordseven if they don’t clasp their hands and kneel

plucking the stems off strawberries from the gardenI recall how I scolded you when you were smallfor squashing the berries before they ripened

my heart whispers: Death, he hasn’t ripened yethe’s still green, nothing in his life has beensweeter than unwashed strawberriesI beg you: oh God, don’t place him at the front,please don’t rain rockets down on him, oh God,I don’t even know what a rocket looks like,my son, I can’t picture the war even to myself

Translated from the Ukrainian by Sibelan Forrester