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  • ‘My Belarus with cornflowers blooming . . .’
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‘My Belarus with cornflowers blooming . . .’

Nadzieja Salanovič

My Belarus with cornflowers blooming,
my land of camomile!
I’m no ‘new Belarusian’ woman,
I cling to ‘older’ style.
Not by broad path, but narrow going
through your fields I wend.
I’m no modern lass, long ago I
breathed in your camomile scent,
I do not measure your ploughlands
to gild my palm, no, not I,
but in the rye gather flowers,
and envy the lark on high
because freely and so sincerely
its song flows the meadows through
and I believe, and feel clearly,
that this is happiness true.


Nadzieja Salanovič

from Poems on Liberty: Reflections on Belarus, edited by Alaksandra Makavik (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2004)

translated by Vera Rich

Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.

Tags:

Belarus flowers home memory nationalism tradition & heritage

About this poem

This poem, representing Belarus, is part of The Written World – our collaboration with BBC radio to broadcast a poem from every single nation competing in London 2012.

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Nadzieja Salanovič

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