IMAGINE

by Steven Croft

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.

VICTORY

by Judith Terzi

after "Where Aleppo's Escapees Converge"

by Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times, 12/19/16

The shelter's in Jibreen. This is no home away from home.
Refugees stream into a factory. Both sides fled their home.

The fleeing & returning cross paths here. Who is who?
Some returning to Aleppo to find the ashes of a home.

Others just escaped Aleppo, a city thousands of years old.
Gunmen set fire to the buses carrying them from home.

Armies shelled a hospital, then a makeshift clinic appeared.
Fathers killed fathers. What to tell the children of home?

Chopped lettuce heaped on a table & vats of donated oil.
30,000 falafel sandwiches. Doesn't charity begin at home?

A teacher writes on a blackboard. Fewer children now.
Some only trace the letters, can't read the syllables of home.

Sweet tea soothes a family huddling to ward off the cold.
Truces broken, re-broken in the broken city called home.

Judith Terzi's poetry has appeared in journals such as Atlanta Review (International Publication Prize, 2015), Caesura, Columbia Journal, Raintown Review, Spillway, and in anthologies such as Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle), Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo), and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Pacific Coast Poetry Series). If You Spot Your Brother Floating By was released in 2015 by Kattywompus Press and a new chapbook Casbah is forthcoming in 2017. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Web.