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March 2022

Poets have always responded to war by writing poetry — it’s what we do. Following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on 24th February this year people started sending The Friday Poem their poems about the war — poems about resistance, poems of protest, and poems about specific individuals affected by the fighting. These are stories of courage, grief and hope. We decided to publish some every week as Friday Poems for Ukraine. Here’s ‘March 2022’ by Becky Cullen. Slava Ukraini!

March 2022

Today I am looking at the ticker tape of trauma 
we used to call the news 
and it makes me think of Russian films
like that sequence 
when a pram is falling down the steps
and I think about the people working in TV
on the only opposition channel
playing Swan Lake as their final broadcast which 
in the last days of the Cold War 
was their first 
and the people working on the radio
on the only opposition channel 
huddling in the corridor before heading home alone 
and the people in the string section 
of the Siberian State Symphony Orchestra 
whose tour is cancelled and how the world is poorer 
without their second violins
and the people leaving fearing martial law 
and the teachers I met from Moscow State University
whether Oleg’s son is safe
if Irina who presented me with a shawl 
embroidered with roses like a mouth of petals 
has lost her singing voice

Becky Cullen is a poet and lecturer from Nottingham. Her pamphlet Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings was a winner of the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet competition and her poems featured in Carcanet’s ‘New Poetries VII’. Her collection A Reader’s Guide To Time is a winner of the 2021 Live Canon Collection competition and is forthcoming. As well as teaching, she presents Notts TV Book Club and manages the Writing, Reading and Pleasure (WRAP) extracurricular programme at Nottingham Trent University.

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