Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Birthplace
Snow today,
no salt on grey
runway roads.
Trees skeleton bare,
mistletoe tumours
on black branches.
Farther south
spent corn stubble
ploughed into fields.
What can I tell you
winter baby
about this day
and the starless night
that followed
with the siren singing
singing children
to sleep
in their basements
while you were already
on your way, born
under another winter sky
and a bright hospital lamp
in a warm room where
your parents waited.
Blackout
Dark slumps down to sleep
extinguishing colours of the car wash,
pizza restaurant, covers pavements,
water fountains, central square.
The stars are left to shine
on sightless homes. It’s something to see
a whole town disappear in minutes.
Dima calls the other side the dark side.
The dark side where no one ever smiles.
Creeping cold is soon inside my room,
frost advances to the windowpanes.
I seal the sleeping bag for body heat.
My headlamp beam is weaker than a candle,
colder too in this dark night
till the generator rouses
cracking the black open.
“These poems were written on recent reporting trips in Ukraine. ‘Birthplace’ is for Milos, the son of my reporting-partner, Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova and was written the day he was born. ‘Blackout’ was written in Kramatorsk while I was working with my friend, Ukrainian producer Dima Pashchenko.” —Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a British/Swedish photojournalist and a poet. Her first poetry collection One Language was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Anastasia has been photographing the war in Ukraine since it started in 2014 and reporting poems about the Russian invasion since 2022.