The trenches. The trenches near the city of Cherkaske. The teapot in the center is a colorful and alienating detail that stands out against the gray of the ammunition and mounds of earth. When we ask ourselves how twentieth-century this war in Ukraine is, we essentially make it a discourse of ancient opposing blocs, of ideological extenuations, of geopolitics. But to think – indeed, to see – that this war is still digging trenches makes you dizzy: for how the tape of time seems to have rewound. It goes back a century and crumples. And I dig up from the shelves a small book of Ungaretti’s poems, yellowed, studied at school – very distant verses that resonate in the present. Verses written at night or at dawn in the trenches.
I have never been / much / attached to life.
The ceramic teapot with its purple flower still testifies to this truth.