O UKRAINE!
i.
Twilight may bloom pink
And covertly maroon
As a lover’s young adult bottom.
The insistently re-articulated song
Of a single, invisible bird
Can fill a whole, leafless sky—
ii.
Still barren, dilatory spring
Here in Maine, nominally
Nearly mud season: snow in the north
And on western mountains—birdsong
Chirrups, tweets, can fill a sky,
But angel glissandos, a female voice’s
iii.
Blurred wordless carillon, naked
And indecent as their soul,
Or so a rabbi has hopelessly intoned
Of bells like the alphabet of that Book
Of Kells, which fondle a person’s
Consciousness and fill their skull-bowl
iv.
With hopeful fantasies of follies past
Like a wind at night makes
Windows whine and tree limbs big
As arms and legs break and fall as if
To writhe and grovel, and yet
Lie motionless as the dead on sorely
v.
Trodden battlefields—O Ukraine,
O limbs and bodies blossoming
Wounds and live buds pink and green
As watermelon tourmaline, to get back
To a melon's raw, red,
Seedy or seedless, solemnly buttressed
vi.
And bifurcated, deft, bold, impudently
Cleft, sweet, round, watery
Meat to whose anatomic geometry’s logic
The mind hypnotically cleaves for dear life
And can involuntarily
Make even the wisest rabbi smile.
vii.
Pink and green, the broken branches’
Live buds: doomed, stubbornly
Living as if the trees’ stark, leafless labyrinth
Against the sky waved, wove, twitched as if
Squid tentacles’ independent brains
In each of their waggling, groping tips.