War Language
. . . poetry is not merely a description of an event;
it is an event.
~ Ilya Kaminsky*
The threat is not speaking
Russian but watching
the tanks lay down
rough tracks in Ukraine.
Already, they've chewed up
the borders of Kharkiv,
spit on the words
from the City of Poets.
Every bullet becomes another
man's eye, every mortar
one more crushing blow
to the head, no body
with the time to argue
one side before the other.
There are shoes in the streets
of Kharkiv, feet herding
to shelter, children in pink
snow suits handed off
to strangers for safekeeping,
the speech of goodbye tears
breaking the silence
that follows the shelling.
Occupied and occupier
cleave the meaning
of war in Kharkiv,
break it down
into fragments of sound —
one, the whistles of rockets;
one, the louder testimony of loss.
#StandWithUkraine
* Epigraph quoted from and poem inspired by Ilya Kaminksy, "Ilya Kaminsky on Ukrainian, Russian, and the Language of War", Literary Hub, February 28, 2022, as excerpted from Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2017), Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, Eds.
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