BARBARIANS AT THE GATE

by Bonnie Naradzay

                with a line from Richard Wilbur

Russia is likely to seize control of the entire Luhansk region of Ukraine within a few weeks, a senior U.S. defense official said, as Ukraine sustains heavy casualties and its supplies of ammunition dwindle. Such a move would leave Russia short of its war aims of capturing all of Luhansk and Donetsk, which together make up the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. But it would still amount to a win for Russian forces and create a new de facto front line that could last for some time. —The Washington Post, June 11, 2022. Photo: Black smoke and dirt rise from Severodonetsk during battle between Russian and Ukrainian troops in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region June 9. (Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)

After reading how the internet takes 

us into a circle of doom because it keeps

us in the recent past, after recursively wading 

into news again about the dark tides of war, 

the brutal devastation in Ukraine, 

the pleas that we not forget their pain,

I thought of Xerxes' bridge of pontoons

over the Hellespont after Darius, stopped 

by the battle at Marathon, failed to subjugate 

the Greeks.  The pontoon bridge collapsed. 

Xerxes, after having his engineers beheaded,

commanded the waters to be lashed

three hundred times.  Shackles were thrown 

into the sea for symbolic effect,

which makes me think of Herodotus,

who changed the meaning of "barbarian”

because of what Xerxes did.

Here I stray again to the continuous loop

of the near past, when Russian invaders 

built a "pontoon" bridge over a river 

not once but twice, with predictable results.

During the Persian invasion at Thermopylae,

that narrow pass, Xerxes asked the Greeks 

to surrender, and Leonidas dared him 

to come take their weapons.

The valiant 300 fought to their deaths,

hoping to buy time for reinforcements to arrive.  

I am thinking of the fighters who were trapped 

in Mariupol, woefully outnumbered; 

of those surrounded now in east Ukraine, 

buying time for the delivery of weapons 

and missile systems they must beg for

in that endless caravan of death.

How quickly we recoil from the page,

leaving us dumbstruck and with an ache.

Bonnie Naradzay’s poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart Nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review Online, Tampa Review, Florida Review Online, EPOCH, Episcopal Theological Review, Pinch (Pushcart nomination), Birmingham Review, Colloquy, and others. While in graduate school, she participated in a class taught by Robert Lowell: “The King James Bible as English Literature.”  In 2010, she won the University of New Orleans MFA Program’s Prize: a month’s stay with Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary, in her castle in the Italian Dolomites.  While there, she enjoyed hearing cuckoos, having tea with Mary, hiking in the Dolomites, and viewing the suit Ezra Pound wore when he lived there.  

For many years she has convened poetry salons with homeless people in day shelters and with retirement community residents in Washington DC.

AT THE SIGHT OF THE WATERS

by Cally Conan-Davies

Flooding in Boulder, Colorado on Wednesday evening, September 11, 2013. Photo posted by brandish on Instagram @photogjake

(An Australian in Colorado relives . . .)

Bring your pillow, what comfort you can carry,
when you evacuate. You wont be home
any time soon.

Keep clear.

Revise your estimate. You will be caught
in a matter of minutes.
Pontoons and yachts are breaking from their moorings,
mangled hulls are hurtling downstream,
battering at the bridges.

Although we sunk our sandbags in the heart
of city streets, and braced against the waters,
the city’s pride— its cafes, party-barges—
powers down the river to destroy us.

The river is collecting all our junk,
rushing away with bathtubs and backyards,
broom-handles, buckets, pots and picnic benches.
Things become missiles when they’re in the flow.

Never cry for what can’t cry for you.

Bury the thought of what waters might unearth;
forget what you’ll recall—
stench, stains, stuff you never thought
would have to be replaced; and despite all
the waters everywhere, we must preserve
our water from the waters.

Find high ground because you cannot know
what lurks inside the waters – snakes, car doors, bodies
wrapped in tarps and blue pool-linings.

Below, backwater bubbles up through drains;
disease will come this way. Sever everything
you thought you knew of water, except for this:

when all revising up and down is done,
and levels finally marked, and mess is cleared,
and rivers shrink from us, and we look back
to praise the volunteers, think of the dead,
and honor the man who held a woman’s son
when the line holding her in his other hand went slack,

we’ll only know how far this flood has spread
when boy and man (see his eyes! how wild the water!)
drown again in the dream where he had caught her.


Cally Conan-Davies taught and practiced bibliotherapy in Melbourne, Australia before moving to the United States in 2012. Her poems have appeared, and are forthcoming, in Poetry, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Raintown Review, The Sewanee Review and The Southwest Review, among others. She lives in both Colorado and Oregon.