Sometimes the broken world intrudes
with such insistence that the mind
must abandon the high mountain paths 
with their cream litter of flannel flowers.  

Sometimes there is no room for sandstone cliffs 
or cool descent into forests of blue gum,   
no, not when from the “hopeless little screen”  
come images of war-ravaged Bucha.  

A camera is recording from inside a car. 
It pans buildings pockmarked by shell and bullet. 
A three dimensional model of Bucha appears,  
pins marking places where civilians were murdered. 

Security cameras capture a line of bound men 
being marched to execution. One, wounded,
not daring to breathe, survives to tell the story. 
The others lie rotting until the soldiers retreat. 

A woman on a bicycle rounds a corner. 
A waiting tank fires and splits her in two. 
A young man lies dead, next to him a bag of potatoes. 
They will lie in the street until the soldiers retreat. 

A woman weeps as she tells her story. 
The soldiers take her grandson. 
Don’t worry, Gran, he says, I’ll be back.
She finds him dead in the street when the soldiers retreat. 

A neighbour tells her they have found her husband. 
Don’t go, the neighbour says. Don’t look, 
but she must go and see he who was her husband, 
now a corpse left under rags after the soldiers retreat. 

In cold blood or drunken rage, these soldiers 
murder more than 400 civilians before they retreat. 
The grief they leave is too deeply twisted to ever be untangled. 
Where, in these streets, could there be room for poetry? 

*******

Kharkiv. Another city, another camera, another car 
slowly passing war-damaged buildings.
No enemy troops have rampaged these streets. 
There are no burnt out and rusting tanks
but still war pours out its dragon breath 
in shells and missiles flung from far away 
to crumble residential towers and indiscriminately kill.  
Crowds gather around newly dug graves. 
Photos are shown of a young poet. 
His grieving friends talk of him 
as they descend into a basement, 
now a shelter from the shells and missiles. 
Those gathered below do not cling to each other in fear. 
They watch and closely listen as a woman reads.
Other readers are waiting their turn. 
In that bombed city, in the midst of war, 
they are celebrating life and embracing creativity. 
Their faces are alive, transformed, bright with joy, 
lit by that singular characteristic, hope, 
which drives them and helps them overcome 
the deliberate horror being wreaked on them.  
They acknowledge death and danger, 
grieve for loss but celebrate survival. 
They vent their anger and list the outrages
but even in this war, they find poetry, 
read their work to one another, 
are transfixed and transformed by it
and seeing them I know that I too 
must turn once again to pen and page, 
to a place of devastation and triumph, 
and write my part of this human story.

*“hopeless little screen” — from “Democracy”, by Leonard Cohen.