Vox Populi
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Askold Melnyczuk: The Enamel Box
Given my mother by a visitor from Ukraine
It was a country and a house
I’d never seen.
This trinket and odd record of humanity,
starfish, pewter, purple, green—
ancestral garden from a greener age—
and I turn outward to the oak which spring
has, like a famished lover, licked
awake.
I imagine
somewhere beyond the tree
that house, the solitary, careful
child within,
and the dragonflies
rising and falling like pistons
above a sputtering stream.
The mother bakes bread by an open
window, humming softly to a dying sun.
The father smokes a pipe, instructs the child:
“Cultivate wheat and a conscience.
In a pinch, forfeit
the conscience
but save that wheat.”
It jars me, this lecture
I’ve imagined, because
there ought to be causes
worth dying for,
and my peasant says no.
Is it the mysteries of Eleusis
he’s understood, while I
battling each morning uncharitable
Aristotle,
worry the fine points,
obscure to the whole?
The old man says to the boy:
“Anyone tells you God cares
about anything except kindness
is a liar.”
I imagine
a mother, a father, a child, a house:
eternal actors, paramours of joy and pain,
except the child, born all eyes,
who sits at the window
watching the dragonflies
and does not know
centuries are passing.
This is how they pass.
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Askold Melnyczuk. From The Venus of Odesa. Poems: New and Selected by Askold Melnyczuk (Mad Hat Press, 2025).
Askold Melnyczuk (born 1954) is an American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. The Venus of Odessa, New and Selected Poems is now available from Mad Hat Press. His work has been translated into German, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Melnyczuk also founded the journal AGNI and Arrowsmith Press.
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What an ending! And true.
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Yes it is!
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“[…] except the child, born all eyes, / who sits at the window / watching the dragonflies / and does not know / centuries are passing.” What a POEM.
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It is a great poem!
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I’ll ponder this poem as it works its magic, like Askold’s dragonflies pistoning or stitching. As a boy watches them, we may open to his imagination inspiring our own connections. As the poem shows, History comes and goes in little darts or immense visions. Time’s dragonfly’s always bobbing and weaving, one guide who leads us on our way. Facts meld with riddles—
Melnyczuk shows it way better.
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Facts meld with riddles…. Yes. Thank you.
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Askold, thank you for this beautiful, powerful poem!
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Brilliant poem!
I think I’ll go out this morning and join a protest, the world of man has gotten itself out ahead of natural truth, is foundering in its own bathwater. Truth like this poem. If we wait—can we wait? The truth will catch up and we’ll stop being children which is to say, start being the grown-ups the great people in our lives growing up told us we were going to be.
They told us who the liars were, some of us stopped believing them I suppose.
i will see you at the protest. A good thing to do while we wait.
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It’s time for all of us, including poets, to go into the streets and shout the truth.
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I’m off to a protest also — worried about “the conscience.” Worried about “the wheat.”
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Today is the day! I’m off to join a protest soon.
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