‘You need a bit of spine lad, stand for nothing and you’ll fall for anything’
A turnip will never be a tomato, but who cares? Fifty-two newsletters ago I wrote about the walk to the book shop that particular morning – it was sunny, the sky was blue, the fields were green – it was the perfect vision of England’s pastoral green and pleasant land – elsewhere in Europe a war was raging. For the last twelve months we have been witness to the greatest of tragedies. Of all the emotions experienced from watching that play being performed on our screens, the one which stands out is resolve – the sadness and the anger are what make us human, but it is the actors with resolve who leave us speechless. As a grandfather once said to his daughter’s son ‘You need a bit of spine lad, stand for nothing and you’ll fall for anything’ – the fruit & veg resolve we need is a fraction of what others are performing.
That newsletter from twelve months ago still resonates, whilst others fled for their lives, selling books seemed of little consequence that weekend. However, this weekend we’re selling books to raise money for the British Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal – 10% from all our online sales from this newsletter over the weekend will be donated to that cause. If you want to donate directly to the British Red Cross, you can do so HERE.
Take Only What is Most Important by Serhiy Zhadan, 2015
Take only what is most important. Take the letters.
Take only what you can carry.
Take the icons and the embroidery, take the silver,
Take the wooden crucifix and the golden replicas.
Take some bread, the vegetables from the garden, then leave.
We will never return again.
We will never see our city again.
Take the letters, all of them, every last piece of bad news.
We will never see our corner store again.
We will never drink from that dry well again.
We will never see familiar faces again.
We are refugees. We’ll run all night.
We will run past fields of sunflowers.
We will run from dogs, rest with cows.
We’ll scoop up water with our bare hands,
Sit waiting in camps, annoying the dragons of war.
You will not return and friends will never come back.
There will be no smoky kitchens, no usual jobs,
There will be no dreamy lights in sleepy towns,
No green valleys, no suburban wastelands.
The sun will be a smudge on the window of a cheap train,
Rushing past cholera pits covered with lime.
There will be blood on your heels,
Tired guards on borderlands covered with snow,
A postman with empty bags shot down,
A priest with a hapless smile hung by his ribs,
The quiet of a cemetery, the noise of a command post,
And unedited lists of the dead,
so long that there won’t be time
to check them for your own name.
Translated from the original Ukrainian text by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps
The full newsletter with links to books can be found HERE
