Sunflowers,

Ukraine, Spring 2022

A shaky phone-cam logged it all, and so

The whole world sees a peasant woman,

Old, afraid, and finding strangers in her land,

Do what the poor will always do

For strangers: she ignores the guns and stands

Four square furious, shaking with both fear

And anger, facing the danger; such a small

Old woman with a giant rage,

Gone to a far place way beyond her fear.

She offers them a gift with angry, quivering hands,

A little babusya facing up to titans, trolls:

Young soldiers with their AKs and their bandoliers,

Their flak-jackets, their goggles and grenades,

Their wire cutters, their killing knives, their trenching spades,

Their helmets and their gibbering headsets.

She holds out to them a welcoming gift: handfuls,

Fistfuls of sunflower seeds, those little pods

Of grace and greeting. For it is the way

With peasant people everywhere on Earth

With strangers, travellers, even in this day of days;

For those who have the least will always give the most.

But the seeds come wrapped in shells of poison words –

Barbed words, and in a voice that spits she says,

“Here, keep them in your pockets boys so, when

We bury you in our good soil, sunflowers will climb

From out your graves toward the blue sky of the truth:

Here take them, they are fat and sweet and good,

Harvested last year from my own blessed fields

With these two hands in long, hard hours.

And take them with my curse so that the flowers,

When they grow tall, will be a monument to

The babies you erased with breast milk on their lips,

The old people whose stories you cut short

That yet had years to come; the families

To whom the word “home” is an empty word,

A hopeless noun, a room in which echoes of loss

Will canon off the walls for years.

These seeds

Will be a living monument to cities, towns

And villages you ground to dust. The flowers

Will stretch their golden faces to the sky

Like children watching summer clouds sail by,

Smiling through the sunlit hours.

But in the night their nodding heads will whisper

Softly to the wind,

Here lie the murderers

That came out of the East, unwelcome and unasked,

Midwives of madness, following

A flag of lies. Now wrapped in that same flag

Of lies they lie themselves in the rich earth,

Our roots are bound about their bones

They are their winding sheets, their shrouds,

Those cheated boys, and mercenaries

Who raped and killed, and in their turn were killed.

Deep down in this gold ocean, this great yellow sea

Of flowers they sleep, wait out infinity’s hours,

The pawns, the murdering tools

Of madmen and of doctrines spawned

In secret rooms and deep

Dark vaults, cursed now for all eternity.

And so the flowers will drop their seeds

Each year so those who come to see

The everlasting fields, will read

Perennial the petals’ legends carved out here.

Stronger than granite, more mighty

And more beautiful than polished marble.

These sunflowers will tell the world

How your young lives were squandered here

Wasted on our sweet, rich soil made richer by your flesh

And bones. Then your poor weeping mothers

Will come throughout the hollow years

To water with their burning salty tears

The endless fields of yellow flower heads,

That reach to the horizon, a golden sea

Under an endless, clear blue sky,

Their faces turning ever to the sun.”