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Poems for Ukraine 17/03/22

Poems for UkrainePoets 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 have decided to publish some every week. Slava Ukraini!

In the Slips by Pratibha Castle
The Innkeeper of Kyiv by Christopher James

In the Slips

While the world watches 
Violetta, clad in years
the measure of a week,
journeys from Odessa 
with her doll and cat 

and a Grandmother 
her face a crumpled map 
of lifetime drills 
framed by a scarf 
the colour of losing
urges a boy soldier 
put this flower in your pocket

hopes his flesh 
rotted into trampled mud
bone and blood
transmuted to 
a claggy womb 
will birth a crop 
of smiling sunflowers

and men in black 
as if spectators 
at a cricket match 
watch a tank 
grizzle over cobblestones
across the city square 
while a man
sprints into its path  
scoops up a hand- grenade 
underarms it 
at a pile of rubble
the dog-end 
dangling from his lip 
a red-eyed fuse

Find out more about Pratibha Castle

The Innkeeper of Kyiv

I will keep open the doors to my bar 
on Khreschatyk Street, and leave the lid  
unscrewed on the horilka. While Kyiv shakes, 
I’ll let its bottle-light of honey and amber fall  
across the page of Segodnya that tells  
the story of how our world has changed.  
This is where our heroes dream; where they  
drink with the ghosts of those that came before:  
the ones who fought the night of the long fire,  
or rode to Kaffa, where the land meets the sea. 
I will press a glass into the hand of any man 
or woman who still calls themselves free. 
What hopes, what hands, what hearts have  
been won in this place? I’ll fetch the phonograph  
from the back room and play loud the songs  
of Bilash; Dva Kolyory will fill our hearts again.  
We have genius to spare. But let me be  
the first to drink to the god that ordained  
a man from Ukraine should invent the helicopter,  
those damselflies of steel and death.   
Igor Sikorsky how could you have known?  
Let them take wing back to the rivers of Russia.  
And Mihkail Gruschevsky, where are you tonight? 
I’ve left a place by the window, with pen 
and ink, and paper enough for you to write 
the next chapter of our history. For once, and I  
do not say this lightly, I will even allow poems  
to be read, with a glass, spilling over, for anyone 
who can summon the words of Taras Shevchenko:  
‘Such is our glory, sad and plain,
The glory of our own Ukraine!’

Find out more about Christopher James

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Read this next

Poems for Ukraine 08/04/22

Poems for Ukraine 08/04/22

'Safety Advice' by Erica Hesketh and 'The Song of Siskin' by Mark Russell — two of our Poems for Ukraine

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