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

1

“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.

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.

ELEGY FOR LVIV AND STANISLAWÓW

by Joel Savishinsky

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.