Il 6 gennaio 1938, Vasyl Stus, un eminente poeta ucraino, attivista per i diritti umani e rappresentante del movimento dissidente, nacque nel villaggio di Rakhnivka (regione di Vinnytsia)

Because of his political beliefs, his works were banned by the Soviet regime, and he spent 13 years in prison until his death in a Soviet concentration camp after a hunger strike on September 4, 1985.

The poem was written by Vasyl Stus during this time. It is autobiographical and reflects the poet’s personal experience in the struggle for freedom and self-expression.

His poems are so unbelievably powerful, check this out:

## A Stranger Lives My Life And Wears My Body
_By Vasyl Stus_
“`
A stranger lives my life and wears my body—
it starts to seem—he spends my years on earth
instead of me.
I have no eyes and ears,
no mouth, no hands and feet. I am estranged
inside my body, and—a lump of
I hover, shut-in-self, in total darkness.
At birth, your psyche ended up stark naked:
you failed to graft together with your body.
You did not manage to attain your flesh.
A passerby who transits interworlds—
you stir, forgotten, at the very bottom
of someone else’s self.
A hundred nights
await you, and a hundred nights have died.
You hover in between—a voiceless doll,
white-hot from self-inflicted scorching pain:
a speck of hell, the Universe’s scream—
laconic and intense, devoid of exits…
A shotgun pellet of the sun—you roamed
and lost your bearings in this foreign body.
You are still waiting for your birth—
however, death entered your existence long ago.

“`