THE WORLD AFTER MORALITY

by Philip Kitcher

Cartoon by Zez Vaz

In honor of his troops, he comes in black.
To save his shattered nation he needs aid.
He’s desperate.  The last defense may crack.
Their only interest: to be obeyed.
 
No ghost from Bucha whispers in this room,
a precinct where the truth is not allowed.
He craves security.  They talk of doom.
He asks for help.  They offer him a shroud.
 
Their callous lips mouth platitudes of peace,
heedless of all the wounds his people feel.
Their “gift”: an interval for war to cease—
and, in exchange, demand that he should kneel.
 
More than a nation’s honor’s left for dead;
they do more than encourage future strife;
the damage wreaked within this room will shred
the moral fabric that sustains our life.
 
What are these creatures in their costly suits,
obsessed with vulgar thoughts of squalid gain?
Do they know what divides us from the brutes?
We’re fully human as we are humane.
 
Indifferent to their or others’ crimes,
to any words a moralist might pen:
what foul distemper has convulsed our times
to vomit forth such parodies of men?

Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His new book The Rich and the Poor (Polity Press) is all about the costs of abandoning morality in politics and public life. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.

WE DIG TRENCHES

by Dmitriy Shandra

Translation by Denis Pinchuk and Bohdan Bondarchuk

 Servicemen of Separate 14th Regiment of Armed Forces of Ukraine dig a trench on the frontline in the Zaporizhzhia region. —The Guardian, November 7, 2023

We dig trenches

too tight to stand and walk in

we dig them nights and we dig them mornings

and evenings we dig them

we are swarm

 

There is death

we will tear out its eyes

cut out its heart

and strangle it with beautiful hair

 

Of

The girl from Mariupol

The girl from Irpin

The girl from Bucha

The girl from Gostomel

 

I promise

Dmitriy Shandra is a poet from Ukraine, Kyiv. He is a paramedic of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

AFTER WATCHING FRONTLINE'S "PUTIN'S ATTACK ON UKRAINE: DOCUMENTING WAR CRIMES"

by Nan Ottenritter

 

Ukrainians walk through Bucha,

unearth, document, store, and ship bodies,

I cry, wonder why, and

 

how such happens. Let’s be honest.

 

I’ve not seen destruction drop from the air,

roll through streets, hide in forests,

root out the hidden in basements.

 

Deadly games of evil and armaments, and

crimes against humanity were addressed at

the Nuremberg Trials.

 

Where are the guardrails now? Let’s be honest.

 

If families flee, suitcase in one hand, child and dog in the other,

grandmas brave cold subway station nights,

white-garbed men count bodies, and

an every-person inspires and leads his country, then

 

surely we can figure this out.

Nan Ottenritter lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her first chapbook Eleanor, Speak is available from Finishing Line Press.

SCENES FROM BUCHA: EARLY SPRING, 2022

by Tom Cartelli

Volunteer cemetery workers loaded a large truck with 65 bodies found in April in Bucha. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times photo accompanying “Three Women of Bucha: Their Deaths and Lives,” by Carlotta Gall and Oleksandr Chubko, October 15, 2022.

“I buried her a bit in the night.

There was so much shelling I did not

know what else to do,” says the elderly

mother of Tetiana Pomazanko, who

lies slumped, head out of frame, torso

covered in plastic, knees bent, thin legs raised

in the photograph.  Child-like at 56, her

“woolen socks and galoshes poked out

beneath the boards,” beside the path where

she had stood thinking the tanks rolling

up her street were “ours” not theirs.

 

 “On Sunday afternoon, on a road leading west

out of Bucha, a man lay dead on his back,

his green bicycle toppled beside him.

Shot through the face, he bore a large hole

in the back of his skull,” the report states.

 

These dead are awkwardly posed, unready

for the defining shot, all that connects

to familiar sights and sounds asymmetric

to the cruel force that pounds them.

A man torn from life by shots from a tank,

twisted on the ground in a worn winter coat.

A woman serially raped and left for dead,

Naked on a basement floor, wrapped in fur.

 

Bodies of old women and men left to starve

in a nursing home, others lying face down,

hands bound, in courtyards and backyards,

scorched to death in burnt-out cars,

left to rot on pock-marked roads, or tumbled

into a ditch. “In one corner, two pairs of shoes

and an arm protruded from a thin layer of dirt,

in another, a hand stuck out,” the report says.

 

Notes: Drawn from reporting of Carlotta Gall, Andrew E. Kramer & Ivor Prickett in The New York Times, April 3, 2022, and additional reporting by Carlotta Gall & photographer Daniel Berehulak in “Bucha’s Month of Terror,” The New York Times, April 11, 2022, this poem was edited, reassembled, and elaborated on by Tom Cartelli. On October 15, 2022, an article in The New York Times identified Oksana Sulyma as the woman imprisoned in a potato cellar, raped, shot in the head, and found wearing only a fur coat.

Tom Cartelli is a theater scholar and emeritus professor of literature and global film studies. He is the author most recently of an essay on three recorded performances of New York's Wooster Group and of two politically driven poems in Politics/Letters. He lives in retirement in Western New Jersey (USA), where he spends his time reading, writing, walking, and altogether too immersed in the news of the day.

FAIRY TALES

by W. Luther Jett

Satellite images show bodies lay in Bucha for weeks, despite Russian claims. —The New York Times, April 4, 2022

Let’s pretend the moon

is made from cheese, and bees

go there when they die,

and the river runs backward

on alternate weeks, and, oh,

the tallest peaks

are covered in ice cream—

you could climb them in just

ten giant steps—or fly.

Yes, let’s pretend that we

can fly. Also, let’s pretend

that summer will have no end.

The rifle isn’t loaded. Those

are not dead bodies there,

bloating in the city square.

W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals as well as several anthologies. He is the author of four poetry chapbooks: Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father (Finishing Line Press 2015), Our Situation (Prolific Press 2018), Everyone Disappears (Finishing Line Press 2020), and Little Wars (Kelsay Books 2021).

BUCHA MASSACRE

by Cathy Hailey

Photo from the streets of Bucha tweeted by Kira Rudik, Member of Ukrainian Parliament, Leader of Political party Golos.

Dead woman 

Perfectly manicured nail

Rises from dirt.

Dead woman

Hands tied behind back

Civilian white tag.

Dead woman

Pulled by rope from road 

Avoiding mines planted within.

Cathy Hailey teaches as an adjunct in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing program and previously taught high school English and Creative Writing in Prince William County. She is Northern Region Vice President of The Poetry Society of Virginia and organizes In the Company of Laureates, a biennial reading of poets laureate held in PWC. Her writing has been published in The New Verse News, Poetry Virginia, The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project, Written in Arlington, and Stay Salty: Life in the Garden State (Vol. 2), NoVA Bards, Confetti, and others. Her chapbook I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth is forthcoming in 2023.