Mykhail Semenko (1892–1937): The Poet Who Reimagined Ukrainian Poetry

Chapter 1. The Boy Who Heard the City
Once upon a time, in a land of wide fields and old villages, there lived a boy named Mykhail who believed that the world was speaking to him.
The wind spoke in whispers through the wheat, the wheels of passing carts sang little songs, and raindrops tapped on the windows like impatient fingers.
But the city spoke loudest of all.
Its trams rattled along the streets, its clocks argued with one another, and its chimneys sent dark clouds curling into the sky like giant question marks.
“Why must a poem always sound like the poems written before it?” Mykhail wondered.
His teacher preferred verses that followed familiar rules, and the grown-ups smiled whenever he asked unusual questions.
“Because that is how poetry is written,” they told him.
Mykhail looked through the classroom window at a tram clanging around a corner.
“Perhaps poetry has simply forgotten how to listen,” he whispered.
That evening, he opened his notebook and wrote a line about a tram that dreamed of becoming a comet.
The line looked strange on the page.
Mykhail smiled.
For the first time, he felt that a poem could open a door no one had noticed before.
Chapter 2. The Museum of Old Words
Years passed, and Mykhail became a poet.
One winter night, he dreamed that he had discovered a museum filled with poems. The museum stood in the middle of a silent square, its windows glowing beneath a silver moon.
Inside, every poem was locked in a glass case.
Some were dressed in golden frames, some wore velvet ribbons, and others sat on marble pedestals beneath signs that read: Perfect. Untouchable. Never Change.
An old caretaker shuffled toward Mykhail.
“These poems are precious,” he said. “No one is allowed to move a single word.”
“But what if a word wants to travel?” Mykhail asked.
“Words do not travel.”
“What if they want to fly?”
“Words do not fly.”
Mykhail approached a case containing a tiny word: tomorrow.
It trembled as he watched.
He placed his hand against the glass, and the word suddenly slipped free. It flew around the room, leaving a silver trail behind it.
Then freedom escaped from another case, followed by city, dream, and possibility.
Soon, hundreds of words were racing through the museum like bright birds.
The caretaker tried to catch them, but the words slipped between his fingers.
“Stop!” he cried. “You are destroying the collection!”
“No,” Mykhail replied. “I am letting it breathe.”
He woke before sunrise with his notebook open beside him.
The museum had vanished, but its windows remained in his imagination.
He began to write poems that broke familiar patterns, rearranged words, and challenged the idea that poetry must always look and sound the same.
He called this freedom an experiment.
Others would call it Ukrainian Futurism.
Chapter 3. The City of Impossible Machines
Mykhail soon imagined another place: a city where buildings could move, clocks could swim, and every street had its own rhythm.
At the centre stood a great machine called the Tomorrow Engine.
It was made from tram bells, printing presses, bicycle wheels, scraps of paper, and hundreds of little gears.
The machine had one purpose: to create new ways of seeing the world.
Every morning, people gathered around it.
A baker asked for a better oven.
A musician asked for a melody.
A child asked for a staircase that could climb into the clouds.
But the engine remained silent.
Its gears turned once, then stopped.
“It is broken,” declared the mayor.
“Perhaps it needs fuel,” said a mechanic.
“Perhaps it needs a new design,” suggested a painter.
Mykhail examined the machine. Every gear was polished, every wheel carefully aligned, and every instruction written according to an old rulebook.
Then he noticed something strange: the machine had no place for an unexpected idea.
He took a blank sheet of paper and drew a door where the rulebook said there could never be one.
The mayor frowned.
“That is not how doors are made!”
“Then perhaps we should make a different kind of door,” Mykhail answered.
He opened the imaginary door.
A gust of wind rushed through the engine, scattering paper into the streets. The gears began to spin, and the machine rang like a thousand tiny bells.
The baker received an oven shaped like a sunflower.
The musician discovered a melody hidden inside the sound of rain.
The child climbed a staircase made of clouds and returned with a pocketful of stars.
The city had not become perfect.
It had become possible.
And Mykhail understood that a new idea did not need to destroy everything old. It needed only to make room for something that had never existed before.
Chapter 4. The Night the Words Went Missing
One autumn, a grey fog descended upon the city.
It crept through streets and courtyards, slipped under doors, and covered the signs above the shops.
By morning, people had forgotten certain words.
The bookseller could no longer remember the word question.
The musician forgot freedom.
The children could not find the word tomorrow.
Whenever someone tried to speak an unfamiliar thought, a bell rang from the tallest tower.
“Use only the approved words,” announced a voice from the tower. “Unusual ideas create confusion.”
At first, the people obeyed.
They spoke in short sentences and repeated the same stories. They stopped inventing songs because every new melody sounded too different from the last.
The Tomorrow Engine slowed.
Its wheels grew cold, and the city lost its colour.
Mykhail stood in the square with his notebook in his hands.
He knew that words could be dangerous to those who feared questions. But he also knew that silence could not protect a city forever.
So he began to write.
He wrote a poem about a window that refused to stay closed.
He wrote another about a tiny seed growing through a stone wall.
He wrote a third about a bird that carried an unfinished song across the rooftops.
He read the poems aloud.
A little girl remembered the word tomorrow.
The bookseller remembered question.
The musician remembered freedom and began to play.
One by one, people found their missing words.
The fog did not disappear at once. Some people remained afraid, and the tower continued to ring its warning bell.
But the city had remembered something important: a word could be hidden, a book could be taken away, and a poet could be silenced—but an idea might still pass from one person to another.
Chapter 5. The Poem That Outlived the Clock
Many years later, Mykhail found himself in a dark room with a narrow window.
The city outside was quiet, and he could no longer hear the trams.
He had been arrested by a government that feared independent thought. The accusations against him were part of a fabricated case, and in October 1937, during Stalin’s Great Terror, he was executed in Kyiv.
The real Mykhail Semenko did not return to his desk.
But in the world of the fairy tale, the Tomorrow Engine had kept a small piece of his imagination hidden inside its oldest gear.
The gear was no bigger than a button.
For years, it lay beneath a layer of dust while the city changed around it. Streets were rebuilt, buildings disappeared, and new generations grew up without knowing the name of the poet who had once challenged the rules.
Then, one spring morning, a child entered an old library.
On a forgotten shelf, the child discovered a book of poems.
Some lines looked unusual. Some words seemed to leap across the page. The poems did not always behave as expected.
The child read one aloud.
A little gear turned somewhere beneath the city.
Then another.
Soon, the Tomorrow Engine began to hum again.
The child could not bring the poet back, nor undo the injustice that had taken his life. But the child could read his work, ask questions, and create something new.
Outside, a tram rounded the corner with a bright metallic clang.
The child opened a notebook and began a poem about a tram that dreamed of becoming a comet.
And somewhere in the great city of words, a door opened.
Not to the past.
To the future.