Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky
From Intermezzo (1908)
Translated by Jacob Guralsky
…You have clad the globe in steel and concrete and breathe your fumes through your countless thousands of yawning windows. You have lacerated the sacred silence of the earth with the clang of your factories and the rattling of your wheels. You have polluted the air with smoke and dust. You are howling like a beasts from joy, malice and pain…
…And people will come out of the endless darkness. There shall be many whom I have never seen before, but who are in me because they have stored their hopes, wrath, anguish and savage cruelties in my heart as in a repository of their own. They are those with whom I cannot part ways, those of whom I am so tired. It is no wonder that they would come once again. Oh-ho, how many of you there are! You are those whose blood seeped out through little holes made by soldiers’ bullets. You are those who swung in your shrouds for a while and were dumped into shallow graves, an easy prey for the dogs…
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