A YEAR AFTER THE CARPENTER AND AN NPR JOURNALIST HUDDLE BESIDE A WOOD-BURNING FIRE IN LVIV

by Ellen Sazzman

Bohdan Kulik served in the Soviet military in the early 1980s in Moscow. He's done a bunch of odd jobs over the years since, he says, but in essence, he's a carpenter. He loves to make staircases. Photo by Ryan Kellman. —NPR, March 17, 2022

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“My true love is building staircases,” the carpenter explains.  

“You must understand the difficulties of crafting a staircase.   

First the wood must be stained. Next...” The journalist 

interrupts, asks if the carpenter is worried about the war.    

 

The carpenter mans a checkpoint. Without a gun but with a crate 

of Molotov cocktails. His job: to stop cars, look for saboteurs.  

He pulls out his phone and shows videos of Russian destruction 

farther east in Kharkiv and Mariupol.  

 

The journalist asks again if the carpenter is worried.  

The carpenter chops kindling, feeds the stove, puts a kettle on.  

He offers coffee, says he’s 62, a pensioner. The carpenter repeats 

the importance of what goes into making a staircase:  

 

collecting accurate measurements, calculating the slope, installing 

risers, treads, handrails. The carpenter pulls out his phone once more, 

shares photos of staircases he has built. The journalist compliments

the staircases:  “They’re beautiful, but about the war?”    

                                                                                                        

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After one year, a long nightmare, try to 

imagine the beauty of staircases, 

the smell of coffee, the warmth of a stove.  

Not the blood of suffering. Not the bombing.  

Not the decision to stay put  

despite what staircases are made for—  

scaling, leaving, fleeing 

through fumes and smoke, through 

a fine ash that still invades Lviv from the East 

and shrouds all things with the salt 

of a terrible weeping before a mute god.  

Pray there is dust enough

to re-make wild birds and beasts, 

to re-form woman and man, to re-plant.

Ellen Sazzman is a Pushcart-nominated poet whose work has been recently published in Peregrine, Delmarva Review, Another Chicago Magazine, PANK, Connecticut River Review, Ekphrastic Review, Sow’s Ear, Lilith, Moment, Common Ground, and CALYX, among others. Her collection The Shomer was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize and a semifinalist for the 2020 Elixir Antivenom Award and the 2019 Codhill Press Poetry Award.

LET PEACE BE THE MOTHER OF EVERYTHING

by Steven Croft

Polemos pater panton (War is the father of all things.)

—Heraclitus

From the internet I read about the bombardment of Barcelona

by Italians, Germans, in 1938, watch the Movietone footage

of children running, the torn arm of a father's tweed jacket dark

with blood even in the film's black and white.  Omen, prelude

of what would come.  Today Germans, Italians, the rest of us,

condemn the bombs' carnage in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol.

The UN was founded in 1945 to prevent world war and make

the world better.  A gradualism powered by hope, a world

where the center will hold, held by our civilized will, forged

from what we all want and what we know we did wrong.  But...

those bomb-melted multistorey wrecks of buildings in the gritty,

jumpy newsreel are grimly colored in today in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol.

War could never be a mother.  Not that she couldn't cradle a rifle

as easily as a baby, plant a garden of mines—but motherhood

is too likely to want the peace to nurture children, is too ready

to negotiate, to drop the aim of a final strike on the wounded,

seeing her own sons and daughters in them, their mothers' pain.

Even if it, she, starts small like an opening bud in spring, compassion

could start at a steel plant in Mariupol where bloody-bandaged men

are being stretchered out to buses today on CNN.  Negotiation

could spread to Kharkiv, Kyiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, peace

could become a warm-bedded garden, now the mother of everything.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

A TANKA FOR THE TWO PEOPLE KILLED IN KHARKIV BY A RUSSIAN MORTAR SHELL

"A loaf of bread on a park bench, collecting snow. A puddle of blood nearby. Those were the traces of two lives lost this past week, two people killed as they sat sharing a late lunch or an early dinner, or maybe just feeding pigeons. No one seemed to know their names. They died at around 5:30 in the afternoon on Sunday in the southeastern Slobidskyi district of Kharkiv from a mortar strike, residents said, describing the victims as an older woman and a middle-aged man." —Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak, The New York Times, April 6, 2022. Original photo by Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Jimmy Pappas is the Zoom moderator for the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.

MENDING NEWS

by Gilbert Allen

                          with apologies to Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a war—

European or wherever—on the tube

that, for a decade, hasn’t had a tube.

We need less breaking and more mending news.

Picture old Movietones run in reverse

where buildings reassemble magically,

crushed bodies levitating from debris,

the bullet a blunt needle stitching flesh,

a mushroom cloud intact Hiroshima

at dawn. And no, I’m not an advocate

for Happy News—feel-good finales that

follow the last commercial with a Fido

wagging his tail from Kharkiv to Lviv

after his westbound owners couldn’t find him

or the insouciant Persian seraphim

purring beneath Mariupol's rubble.

No, what I want is just a world made whole

after each so-called surgical attack. 

That would be good both going and coming back

for all us sorry old stone savages.

Gilbert Allen lives and writes in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His most recent collection of poems is Believing in Two Bodies.