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Under the blazing sun tying the sheaves of wheat in the field. In her embroidered linen shirt.12 When the poet portrays his own mother she is in her embroidered shirt on an Easter Sunday morning. Yet she is not on her way to church, but to the family garden, to meet Mother Earth and greet the Heavenly Sun. As we know, Christianity adapted well in Ukraine because people had since immemorial times worshipped the sun. In this poem, the Ukrainian mother stands in her Sunday best and with her gestures she is one with the Tripyllian woman as she bows to Mother Earth, faces the sun and addresses the rain and the wind. She stands in her garden and pays homage to Nature and the elements of Fire, Water and Air so that she can feed her children. This poem brings to mind a statuesque image of a courageous woman who expresses her faith in the Earth for its kind bounty. With this image the poet covers centuries of worshiping, the remnants of which is still present in our celebration of Christmas and the preparation of God’s food, the “kutia." When my mother goes out to the garden She wears an embroidered white- shirt, And behind her from the garden, the morning comes up On the holy, most-holy Sunday. But mother stands in primordial silence, Fluffing-up the dew-covered earth, Even today people think that Mother was praying, As if to summon the Holy Virgin to appear. But Mother is praying to the buckwheat, to the beans, The destitute must pray silently and early, Then she turns to the sun and makes the sign of the cross She prays first for the rain and then for the wind. And in her prayer there is a Big Prayer, She confesses to the earth, she asks the earth to guide her... We too, wondered, when we saw that, When we were still children, running bare-foot...13 We have all been nurtured in our identity by one embroidery or another: our first shirt or blouse, the votive cloths hanging around the icons, the embroidered runner, the festive tablecloth, the sofa- cushion-cover, the Kobzar's bookmark, the pin cushion, the book-cover. Historians will one day even write about women's blouses embroidered on bits of World War II parachute cloth. All of these are part of our history and part of our daily life. As we move in life we pack them with care because through them we are able to recognize one another anywhere in the world. They speak of our identity. I remember my first embroidered blouse and now I have my own contribution to this tradition, a sampler, just like the first American pioneers used to embroider. Mine has two rows of Ukrainian Cyrillic letters topping it, with a very balanced "zh" and "kh" in the middle of each row. The alphabet is followed by three rows of embroidered patterns in black-and- red, inspired by my mother's shirt: a row of creeping periwinkle, a row of tiny guelder-rose bloom and a row of tiny roses. At the bottom I tried to reproduce the Kozak playing his bandura from page 41 of Invincible Spirit. 1. Invincible Spirit. Bohdan Arey, Bohdan Yasen and Taras Horalewskyj. Baltimore-Chicago-Toronto-Paris: Smoloskyp Publishers (1977). 2. How A Shirt Grew in the Fields. K. Ushinsky, Marguerita Rudolph and Yaroslava Surmach Mills. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company (1967). 3. The Sap of Life. Dmvtro Pavlychko. Kyiv: Mystetsvo (1989). 4. "Poem About A White Shirt." Poezii. Poemv. Ivan Franko. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka (1991) Vol. I: 443-462. 5. "My Mother's Rushnyky." Poezia. Tetiana Pyshniuk. Kyiv: Radianskyi Pys'mennyk (1989): 142. (Translation by Helene Turkewicz-Sanko). 6. "A Little Bird From the Rushnyk." Poezia. Mykola Ratchuk. Kyiv: Dnipro (1991): 82. (Trnaslation by Helene Turkewicz- Sanko). 7. Ukrainian Embroidery. Ann Kmit, Johanna Luciow and Loretta Luciow. Minneapolis: The Ukrainian Gift Shop. (1984): 12-13. 8. "Only the Rushnyky Embroidered By You." Beyond Tradition. Kyiv-Toronto (1993):402. (Translation by Helene Turkewicz- Sanko). 9. "The Shirt." Anthology of Soviet Ukrainian Poetry. Mykola Nahnabida. Kyiv: Dnipro (1982): 234-235. (Translator unknown). 10. “Song About A Rushnyk." Anthology of Soviet Ukrainian Poetry. Andryl Malyshko. Kyiv: Dnipro (1982): 68. (Translation from Ukrainian Embroidery). 11. Molius Na Tebe/I Pray For You. Petro Host'. Lutsk: Nadstyria (1995): 137. (Translation by Helene Turkewicz-Sanko.) 12. “A Woman From the Steppes of Ukraine." Broken Strings. New York: Shevchenko Scientific Society, Inc. (1995): 337. (Translation by Helene Turkewicz-Sanko). 13. "When My Mother Goes Out to the Garden." Ketiahy Rvbnians'koi Oseni. Volodymyr Katchkan. Ivano-Frankivsk (1995): 16-17. (Translation by Helene Turkewicz-Sanko). ’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ТРАВЕНЬ 1997 21
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