This project brings together two poems presented in video form, Two Doves in Love and The Bloody King, which engage with lived experience of war, memory, and moral responsibility. Rooted in contemporary Ukrainian reality, the works move between moments of fragile hope and stark confrontation with violence, power, and loss.
Two Doves in Love emerges from an air-raid alarm in Kyiv in the spring of 2024. Against the backdrop of sirens, drones, and underground shelters, the poem captures a fleeting yet transformative image: two doves rising into the sky above a blooming city. Their flight becomes a gesture of defiance against destruction, a symbol of love and faith persisting amid fear. The poem reflects how poetry itself can function as shelter – offering calm, reassurance, and continuity, especially for children growing up under constant threat. Presented as video, the poem holds together testimony, lyric vision, and a quiet insistence on life.
The Bloody King turns toward the aftermath of war and the psychological scars carried by soldiers long after fighting has ceased. The poem speaks from within a landscape where commands are unquestionable, lives are expendable, and power feeds on sacrifice. It exposes the machinery of war as driven by distant rulers whose ‘laurels’ are built on blood, while ordinary people bear irreversible loss. The repetition of orders and refrains mirrors the inescapable logic of violence, transforming the poem into both accusation and warning.
Together, the two poems form a diptych: one anchored in a moment of grace during catastrophe, the other in the enduring damage inflicted by authority and militarism. Presented through video, the project emphasizes voice, presence, and immediacy, positioning poetry as both witness and act of resistance. It speaks from within war, not as abstraction, but as lived reality – where beauty and terror coexist, and where language struggles to preserve humanity against systematic destruction.
Two dows in love
The bloody king
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Disrupted Realities – Poetry and the Politics of Truth.
Author
Mary Nikolska
Mary Nikolska was born in 1976 in Kyiv. Graduated with honors from the Kyiv National University. Translates in verse ("Max Musterman und Lieschen Müller"of Franziska Bauer, and many Greek songs, too), also writes her own poetry (lyric collection "Auf des Windes Schwingen" by Apollon Tempel Verlag and "Durch Jahr und Tag", “Dona Nobis Pacem” by E.Weber-Verlag with Franziska Bauer ) and prose ("We'll never be apart!", 'When two shores meet").
