Scribbling seems so impotent, but...
LESSONS
Lviv and Kyiv
(not Kiev now, no)
Odessa
and, yes, sadly Chernobyl
we knew
but now we
know Dnipro
too
Irpin and Bucha
Sumy of the blazing streets
Kharkhiv and Kherson
we get our tongues round
Zhaporizhzhia
Chernihiv
Mykolaiv
and
poor, battered, martyred Mariupol.
A map of horror and of heroes coalesces
from the wide cold mist that is
far Eastern Europe in the western mind
and out of the fog come ordinary folk
the faces - so like ours -
the anoraks and puffa-jacketed mums and kids
wrapped for all the world like
those outside our Primary schools
on winter afternoons at half past three
except for them it’s dripping basements,
sirens and the crump of shells for tea
The Academic Drama Theatre
refined refuge from the storm outside
explodes, a mass of rubble,
white columns and three storeys,
stucco frieze and chandelier
ranked seating and the painted scenes
tumbling on the huddled crowd beneath
дети
дети
Deti ! Deti ! shout the desperate painted
warning signs, precursors of despair
white against the tiles of the gracious square.
The pilots or the drone controllers will have seen
and understood - and chosen to ignore.
Hospitals pile the dead in corridor
and basement and there is no time for burial
still less for aching funeral
дети (deti) - children.
And repeat, speak up !
дети (deti) - children.
A Russian lesson,
bitter, drilled home, stern
like the lesson on the crumpled map
we wish we hadn’t had to learn.
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