LAND MINES

by Tricia Knoll

The Biden administration has approved supplying Ukraine with American anti-personnel mines to bolster defenses against Russian attacks as Ukrainian front lines in the country’s east have buckled, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday. —The New York Times, November 20, 2024

I hear those words and think of Diana

in head gear walking in Angola,

 

facing pitfalls and explosives

as she walked for peace. 

 

I hear those words and remember that rat

Magawa who won a gold medal for sniffing,

 

alerting and the giant Gambian pouch rats

that followed, searching for buried armaments, 

 

whom handlers named Harry Potter and Godiva. Rats

that live nine years, a good training investment. 

 

Battlefields laced with mines to remove legs and end lives,

in places distant from me – Iran, Iraq, Sudan,

 

Syria, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, and more

My country never a signatory to the treaty

 

to prohibit them. The cost to make a mine

one hundredth of the cost to remove. 

 

I thought of land mines and never thought

my people would plant them 

 

in fields sowed for sunflowers.  

Tricia Knoll has no great love for rats, having lived with a few, but respects the capabilities of  pouched rats. Her work appears widely in journals and nine publications, either full-length books or chapbooks. She is a Contributing Editor to the online poetry journal Verse Virtual. She is grateful to The New Verse News for allowing her to write feelings that the news of today sparks.