TO BEAR OR NOT BEAR ARMS /FUGITIVE SECURITY

Two Poems by Alex Nodopaka

📸VISUALS📸

❗️Video from inside the apartment during a missile attack in Kyiv.#Kyiv #Russia #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/SRgk0WXU5F

— Aarian  (@Worldnews195) February 26, 2022

NOTE: This video is NOT from Alex Nodopaka's niece's apartment but from Twitter.

1. To bear or not bear arms

 

As my niece in Kyiv

is being shelled

I write poems

based on her words*

and what I see

on our TV.

 

I hold my Siamese

the way I imagine

her holding hers.

It seems odd to me

with the repressed

memories I held

 

for over 80 years

but that's all I can do

except bear arms

and join her.

I never in my life

thought I'd say

 

Damn Russia.

 

2. Fugitive security*

A poem based on the words of Alex Nodopaka’s niece in Kyiv.

 

The daily shaking of the 5th

floor of the building

where I live frightens me.

 

Nightly I put down

a few blankets on the floor

of my bathroom.

 

The only place that offers

a false sense of security.

Wedging my head

 

between the toilet

and the wall for protection

I try to sleep

 

despite the rumbling

keeping me awake.

 

Alex Nodopaka originated immaculately in Ukraine in 1940. Speaks San Franciscan, Parisian, Kievan & Muscovite. Mumbles in English & un poquo de Madridista. He sings in tongues after Vodka, has studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Casablanca, Morocco. Presently full time author and visual artist in USA.

TROPHY HUNT

by Pepper Trail

Image source: The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Elephant, what man
Not driven by hunger
Not confronted by your bulk, your tusks
Not defending his house or farm

Knowing what we know
Of your vast and furrowed memory
Of your lines of mothers and aunts
Of the slaughter pursuing you across the continent

What man
Thinking of you, elephant
Your dignity, your utter majesty in this world
Thinks of killing

Travels thousands of miles
Spends a useless fortune
Is led to you, elephant, quiet in your life
Asks for the heavy gun, and shoots

What man
Cuts the tail from your great body
Poses for the pictures, fills out the forms
Flies satisfied away

Leaving an erasure in the map of Africa
Your circuit of waterholes, lost
The hiding-place of your family bones
The silent harmony of your song, sung through the earth

What man
Consults the record books
For spread of ego, weight of pride
Fills a trophy-room with ignorance
Elephant, what beast?

Pepper Trail is a conservation biologist, poet, and photographer living in Ashland, Oregon.  His poems have appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Pedestal, and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards.  He has long been involved in efforts to protect wildlife and wild places.  His collection Cascade-Siskiyou, a cycle of poems about Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument (currently under threat by the T***p Administration), was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

ATTITUDE

by Brigitte Goetze

Archive photo: AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Winnipeg Free Press-Wayne Glowacki

The alternative ways are in stark opposition, but if she works patiently through her difficulties, trusting herself to life, living each day as fully and as truly as possible, seeking through sincerity of living to solve the problem of their opposition, she may perhaps find a way to a reconciliation. —Ester Harding

Power will have its way,
no matter how damned
its path. Like flood water
it will widen a small crack,
splitting the land into two,
uprooting what stands innocently
in its commandeered course.

You, who live upstream,
pick up whatever tool you have,
wheelbarrow, shovel, hoe,
rush up the Hill, help
draw a ditch across the slope,
diverting the deluge’s downpour
away from seedlings and old shrubs.

And you, who live downstream,
join your neighbors,
fill sandbags or nourish those
working: many a place can be
cordoned off from the swollen,
murky, ice-cold torrent against
which weapons of war are useless.

Energy cannot be destroyed, but
it can be channeled. Even if some will not
be protected from the inevitable
mud flow, yet, it may not devour all.
We are able, willing, and ready
to defend with our hands and hearts
what we have labored so hard to build.

Brigitte Goetze lives in Western Oregon. A retired biologist and a goat farmer, she now divides her time between writing and fiber work.