Ukraine – 15 Prophetic Harvest by Walter Bargen

The artillery is back demanding too much too loudly.
When they are happy with death, the batteries cough
Up dirt and flames. What every poetic soul fears,
Blaming the earth for this savage pandemonium. 
It’s the exploding silence that is the enemy. 
It’s clear that bullet proof vests are not enough
For this life or the next. 

It begins and ends in a forgotten snowstorm
Where everyone craves escape from the heat of themselves. 
Their eyes closed even as half-frozen flies try to pry them open,
Hoping to see the flakes of other minds fall into deepening drifts. 

There’s always a chance to see things anew,
Forget the ambush along the hedgerow
Between sunflower fields. So quick, so decisive,
Not a moment’s hesitation, not another breath.
Surely, it’s some kind of joke. Does anyone
Remember the punchline?

The stiff bodies laid out on their backs,
Straight and thin as the furrows that they lie between.
They don’t rise above the earth that hems
In their shoulders. What’s left to plant in these fields?
Kilometers away, their comrades are burning 
The harvest and salting the shell-ravaged 
Rows with cluster bombs.

Between 1932 and ’33, four million peasant farmers, 
Their wheat stolen by a blood-soaked leader,
Died of starvation. Now it has its own name
In Ukrainian: Holodomor. In 2023 there are so many 
more bodies to collect and replant before the spring 
offensive even as the granaries are rocketed.