Cynthia Steele In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine: Poetry of the Invasion

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CIRQUE

VOICES OF UKRAINE

Cynthia Steele In Solidarity with the People of Ukraine: Poetry of the Invasion

Steadfast Robin Lindley

As of this writing, Ukraine is at day 93 of the RussiaUkraine war. Casualties are difficult to measure. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians have died since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. This issue of Cirque provides a forum and breaks down its own walls for that forum. We sent out a call for writings in response to the invasion of Ukraine and all that has followed, not knowing what to expect. This special section and all who worked with it stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. A trickle and then a stream of submissions issued forth and we gift them to our readers with one heart.

I sought inspiration to illustrate such an offering. I saw a stained-glass art piece glowing in a Homer, Alaska window of a fisherman and his wife. The image of a dove holding an olive branch. Vivid blocks of glass held fast by a cement setting met me through the window. Ukraine heavy on my mind, I’d rented their small home for the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference this May. With tremors still in my soul of Jericho Brown’s words against and about violence, such as in Psalm 150: “Something keeps trying, but I'm not killed yet.” I asked my short-term landlady, Jane Wiebe, about the artwork. It was constructed by her

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father-in-law Herman Wiebe (d. 1985), and the glass held great meaning about the artist’s Mennonite background and personal belief in nonviolence that inspired all of his work. Perfect, I thought. His son captains Alaskan waters, and his wife had invited me in for tea.

I told Jane of the handful of poems about the invasion of Ukraine. About Evgenia Jen Baranova’s poem “Memory,” translated from Russian to English by Sergey Gerasimov, a Ukraine-based writer, poet, and translator of poetry. Evgenia asks, “What lingers in the bluish memory?” The answer may be found in the heart-wrenching end of this poem:

No home, no friends, no flowing river, just the rusty hook of memory sticking in the deserted heart.

Ironically, Baranova, born in Kherson, Ukraine, lives in Russia and is the author of a book of poems, Rybnoye Mesto (The Fishable Spot). This reminds me of how rivers all come together, like many little, rippling rivulets.

Another poem translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian is by Kristina Kryukova. “Look Up, Above Yourself” describes a “bottomless, endless” sky and a country.

The absolute and chimeras intertwine in that mystical country. And since the beginning of time, everything's marked by the divine touch. And it's not terrifying to vanish, So I am quietly, silently burning...

She reaches out to a creator with hope, but the speaker’s pain is tangible.

Her poignant “The Voice” describes a rebellious blood that travels through her veins, and this blood cries out:

…while any sound I utter is rough and brief. All that lives in me boils, flows like lava down and out through the fingers of my tired right hand.

This is what it is to write poetry—doing the thing that we must. The writing that defies suppression. She describes this so well.

Julia Smorodova’s lovely lines in “It’s November” reveal wonderfully fragile and human moments between strangers draping a coat over shoulders and looking forward to the future New Year when

…We'll have a party, Olivier salad, the sour smell of some booze, fireworks in the concrete yard clouded with prickly cold.

Tatiana Retivov has lived in Kyiv, Ukraine since 1994, where she runs an Art & Literature Salon and a small publishing press. The narrator in Retivov’s “On the 40th Day,” watches life leave a body, wondering if metempsychosis (transmigration at death of the soul into a new body) is viewed through Agenbite of Inwit (remorse of conscience). Nonetheless, a person’s presence (Dasein) remains even through their “final gasp.”

For these words, we lift our borders so that these writers may share with us what they experience so far away from where many of us are.

Sandy Kleven sought to publish Lyn Coffin’s “Not Orpheus. Not David.” after seeing it posted online. More than 30 of Coffin’s books are published by Doubleday, Ithaca House, Adelaide Books, etc. This poem speaks of the hero many have come to share, Volodymyr Zelensky:

And if he dies, we will make ourselves harder than stone in astonished grieving. Our heads will be higher, our hearts will be keener, the more the madman lays us waste.

Coffin later submitted “A Sestina on Destruction,” which combines the sublime—the hauntingly and beautifully disturbing moments of loveliness frozen in times of horror in this truly great poem that I wept upon reading and rereading.

The stairs are littered with glittering glass, a door downstairs is leaning from its hinges as if gagging, plants overturned, clothes flung, windows fanned out on the floor, walls crumbled, light coming through holes like hungry mouths...

One must remember this poem like Ukraine, like the piano player that disintegrates within the lines of the poem.

Oregon poet and author of multiple collections, Brittney Corrigan, submitted “No-Fly Zone,” that explores the world of war in Ukraine by imagining that, instead of

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warfare, birds filled the sky. From the perspective of the birds, as “we,” she writes:

Before, the blue roof of this country veed with snow buntings. Rock sparrows. The vanity of yellow-billed loons. Now, the sky is crowded with shelling.

Alaskan nonfiction and poetry author Nancy Deschu writes using science and the landscape and submitted two, strong Haiku with her own images of gunnery bunkers and landing strips.

A poet who splits her time between Juneau, Alaska and Cape Meares, Oregon, Helena Fagan describes herself as a grandmother in her poem “As Bombs Fall on a Maternity Hospital in Ukraine,” her arms emptying of her granddaughter, back to her parents and flashes on

Today, fortune determines that bombs fall elsewhere. Babies and bombs in one breath…

Fagan brings two worlds together in a massive twinge of empathy for the babies of war.

Alaska-based poet Leslie Fried combines her own dreams intermingling with the Ukrainian war in “The Hotel” — a place where the recently made homeless have gathered:

souls drift in to crowd the lobby packing un-packing tears, slaps and slingshots dirty pillows, a sacred scroll the hallways and stairwells are poorly lit

People of various walks of life all with meager belongings co-mingle, seeking shelter and more.

Francis Opilia’s “Weight of the World,” serves as a meditation on weight, bones, and a wish for lightness.

The young woman holding a sign in “We Will Rave on Putin’s Grave,” my own poem, responds to stories but primarily photographs in newspapers on the bombings and attacks on Ukraine—images that stay with me of people and situations I see long after my eyes close. The symbols of justice, the numbers that we keep looking to see updated in various locations like Mariupol: Kyiv half empty where women sleep huddled in a house cellar men dead in battle, a small son hears muffled detonations in the distance

What do these locations mean strategically in war? What do they mean as a homeland? What it is to awaken to war?

While Richard Stokes’ “Images Hammered into Memories” brings home the horrors of current war: “Dark plastic bags lumpy with dead bodies,” the poem also brings back the graphic nature of First World War poems, making it a painful read. This is the poet’s intent. “Medics in blood-stained scrubs. Babies crying. / Crackle of fire, the ratta-tat of small arms, / earth-shaking explosions…” from Ukraine “… shock the consciousness / of the comfortable.”

May these poems make the reader less comfortable. It is good and fitting that we be uncomfortable with war and all its leavings. May those who wandered without a home because theirs was blown to bits know that we felt, for one moment, a fraction of their displacement. Though we know to varying degrees the ravages of war, from reader to reader, may we stop for a few moments and imagine, or reacquaint ourselves with it. These perspectives and reflections on war are succinctly put in brilliant yet embattled moments and from many geographies. May we all break down walls to know the pain of others.

I cannot forget the words of Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others where she says: “…set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may — in ways we might prefer not to imagine — be linked to their suffering.”

The words that Judith Skillman chose in her poem “You Watch” discuss the game of football and how passive it now seems: “I watch you watch / and I remember this is a game. / The real war is outside / where rain pours from a door / in the sky.” Are we a nation of watchers? If so, imagine what we could accomplish if we, too, looked up.

When we imagine the pain and loss of the Ukrainian people, may we all feel, in some way, part their land’s watershed and bloodshed through the words of these poems. We are linked to their suffering; may we find ways to be an active part of their recovery. There are so many ways and means to help refugees. The first is to read their words and to engage in their situation. Then, become

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