I was honored to share the stage with so many talented writers at the Ukrainian American Poets Respond launch last weekend. Our poems were a cry for justice, a prayer for peace, a call for remembrance, and a demand to be seen and heard.
Thank you to Olena Jennings and Virlana Tkaczfor organizing such a powerful event and anthology, and to the Ukrainian Institute of America for allowing us to use their beautiful space to share our poems about Ukraine, the war, our roots and our future.
It has been 197 days since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Ukrainians are still fighting.
Every morning, I check Twitter to see the updates from Ukrainian journalists, activists, artists, and writers that I follow. There is always news: Here is the devastation and sacrifice. Here is the heroism and resilience. Слава Україні!
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian diaspora tries to collect resources, rally support, and share the stories, names, and photographs to help the Ukrainian people and keep the world from forgetting.
On Friday, September 16, I will join other Ukrainian American poets for a reading at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City.
We will be reading our poems from the “Ukrainian American Poets Respond” anthology edited by Olena Jennings (Poets of Queens) and Virlana Tkacz (Yara Arts Group).
I am honored to have my poems included in this collection, and I hope that some of you will be able to come out on the 16th:
It is my father, Walter Dudycz’s birthday today. These past few weeks I have been thinking about a lot about what he taught me about hope. (In Ukrainian the word is надія….also my sister’s name.) I can see how hope shaped my father’s life, and his example of hope has shaped who I am.
When I was a teenager, I thought that I was just an optimist; but the older I got, the more I realized that was not true. Optimism is not the same as hope. Optimists expect good things to happen.
I’m actually not an optimist. What I am is hopeful. I was taught by my father that hope is the belief that when the bad things happen, you can work together to overcome those things.
That idea and all its parts have shaped everything for me:
It implies awareness that bad things that have happened and will happen.
It calls out that hope requires action.
It also implies that hope can be shared. Hope in community is powerful.
And at its heart, hope is a belief. For my father and for me, belief implies the mystery of something greater than us in the Universe. That belief means that hope and prayer are interconnected.
From my father, I also learned:
We need to keep practicing hope, or we can lose it. The more we use it, the stronger it becomes.
The memory of hope can help us to rediscover it.
Hope is a tool. We take it, and we do things with it. We need hope to make changes in the world.
Sometimes those changes take a long time. Hope can come in tiny steps.
Stories and songs about hope help it to grow and spread.
When we share hope, it gets stronger.
I thought about this when I was at one of the rallies in support of Ukraine last weekend. I saw that hope in my father’s eyes, and on the faces of the people around us holding signs and chanting, as well those passersby who honked and waved.
Someone asked me why we go to rallies, what good does it do? I think I have a better answer for them now after thinking about it.
