The seventh poem in Three Hundred Poems by Lina Kostenko, pages 12-13. Originally untitled.

A long one, a sweet one, a tricky one, one I’m not entirely happy with, one that’s a little looser in some places than I’d like. I don’t love how far the first two lines stray from the original here. The literal is more like “in the desert of dove-colored evenings, in endless fields under the sky.”

I’m trying to be better about including feminine rhymes (multi-syllabic rhymes, like own hand / homeland, or no doubt view / about you) more often when they’re integral to the original, while also trying to forgive myself for slant rhymes and struggling not to hew too far from literal meanings.

Also, how neat is that word? Сизий: a specific color word for the blue-gray of a dove. It’s etymologically separate from the word for dove, and yet is always defined as the color of one.