by Joel Savishinsky
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| As Russia’s vicious attack on Ukraine continues, the western “safe haven” town of Lviv (top photo) is bracing itself to join the theatre of war. “We expect there could be an attack,” says Olga Myrovych, 34, head of the Lviv Media Forum. “We are far from Putin’s border, but this will distract the efforts of the Ukrainian army.” Lviv is a central European jewel, an exceptionally elegant town with a long history of culture and tragedy. —Institute for War & Peace Reporting, February 27, 2022. In the lower two photos, Ivano-Frankivsk (formerly Stanislawów), a city located in Western Ukraine, had its airport, fuel, and lubricants depots destroyed by the Russian missile systems. The city, formerly Stanisławów, is almost 600km away from Kyiv. With the city airport bombed, the people of Ivano-Frankivsk are being evacuated to bomb shelters. —SAYS, February 26, 2022. |
The heart can be broken
in so many ways: lost love,
position, regard and address.
Janus is a novice when staring at
the diamond faces of disappointment.
We fear that even poetry may not
matter, that we have no voice, that
we have one but cannot be heard.
Shall we carry our broken hearts
before us like a banner, shouting
rage into the wind, using our mouths
and pens to signal from, or to,
a distant land.
When arms have been withheld,
can the body of words suffice
where other parts have failed, or
is hope already the disembodied
ghost of those about to die.
Crushed by the alien arms and armies,
the four-chambered heart of
our grandmothers’ homelands
may soon be a million lost freedoms,
the ones our leaders and
the whores of Babylon have each
mis-filed in the archives of revelation.
Joel Savishinsky is the author of Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America (Cornell University Press, 2002), winner of the Gerontological Society of America’s book of the year prize. His parents and grandparents, and those of his wife, immigrated to the US from western Ukraine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, escaping pogroms, anti-Semitism, and the impending invasion of the Nazis. Their communities of origin are named in the poem’s title.