by Steven Croft
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| AI-generated graphic for The New Verse News by Shutterstock |
If instead of munitions, we could send Ukraine a spring
without war,
see Russian soldiers march off singing, "There is No Rank
Higher Than a Soldier's Mother," as mothers
who love them call them back home,
As the Dnieper thaws, let Ukraine beat its swords
into ploughshares for its golden fields of wheat, the farmers
no longer molested by fighter jets,
Let its cities be beautiful European cities again, free of
shelled and crumbling buildings, with
vibrant commerce and carefree nightlife, let people
sit idly in cafes, reaching calmly for coffee cup, newspaper,
its list of dead gone – for now,
Unwind stacked car graveyards of burnt-out husks,
bomb-twisted chassis, put them new again on roads
unpocked by explosion,
Let the countryside host tortoiseshell butterflies and roe deer,
the sound of bees visiting flowers, instead of armies
of tanks,
Let unstartled horses and cattle whip their tails idly in pastures
behind mended fences,
Let Ukraine part the dark curtain of daily anticipatory death,
box up the war strategy, the screams of wounded and dying, grief
of the living, tape them shut—for now,
Send home its stretched-thin, worn-out army of war,
Let its President wear a suit again, let his face cast off its war
fatigue, his body the green battle fatigues,
All over Ukraine let bells of peace and respite ring from the shingled
belltowers of wooden churches, let them dance the hopak
with fevered joy.
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, December 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.