UNFURLING AN OLD FLAG
—With thanks to Nâzim Hikmet’s Things I Didn’t Know I Loved
of the old wood-panel theater, filled to the rafters with comrades,
filled with the sultry August heat and sweat, while outside
the open windows, linden trees conspiratorially whisper
the secrets of the air to the dank river.
Our oppressive clothing, like the local KGB, sticks to us like glue.
Minoga ludi, says Oleg, my interpreter.
Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best
though it is not Sunday. No church bells tolling.
I am a visitor, not a tourist, I am bearing witness.
An Irish-American poet lost in the land of fields.
In the corner, stands the obligatory red flag of the USSR,
soaked in the blood poppies of the fallen,
with its golden hammer and sickle, that reaped more
than a harvest of wheat.
On the stage, Cossack dancers in red boots
lash out with their feet, while an old man recites
Taras Shevshenko’s verses
to the strands of the balalika. A hush falls over the room
as two maidens join him onstage,
they are dressed in national costume
with wheat fronds in their floral headdresses like a halo
or a nimbus cloud catching the last light of the sun.
They carry something old and tasseled, on a pole,
and as they unroll it, the audience gasps.
This is treason, said Oleg, despite Glasnost.
But there are too many of us to be disappeared
during these halcyon days of open-armed Glasnost.
I repeat, I am bearing witness. I am bearing witness
as I watch
a flag that was hidden, silenced for nearly 75 years, unfurl.
Blue for the sky and the cornflowers in the fields,
and yellow for the endless wheat and the sunflowers.
The lustrous silk quivers and glistens in the limelight,
takes center stage as if it were about to sing an aria.
And so it did. Words once uttered, cannot be unsung.
There is no taking it back. The road goes ever onward.
I have some questions: who kept that flag safe all those years
and how was it hidden from the aggressor? In what attic, or dacha?
In what Peredelkino? First, they came for the poets….
A call to poetry is a call to arms.
They are one and the same, said my friend.
The silence in the room was astounding, no one dared breathe.
And then one old voice began to warble the strains
of the Ukrainian national anthem.
Another voice, also hoary and frail with age, joined him.
Soon, others joined in, at first, hesitantly, mouthing the words,
and then they sang with vigor and gusto, as they dusted off
the words unsung for a nearly three-quarters of a century.
We had witnessed something holy and profound.
The word was on everyone’s lips
though not all knew the anthem.
And that day, there was no going back.
I didn’t know I loved the way that old flag unfurled,
or the way that paper sheath, stained with age, crackled like fire,
or the way the dustmotes trapped in the floodlights
took on the twilight of the stars. Sometimes, the road stops here.
And there are things you can no longer retreat from.
It’s February 28, 2022, as Russian tanks wend their way
towards the heart of the motherland, all roads lead to Kyiv,
the ludi running ahead of those tanks, removed all the road signs,
they blew up the bridges, sacrificing their lives, 752 civilians dead.
Electronic road signs & billboards, uploaded with words in red lights:
Go fuck yourselves! до росії на хуя. Go back to Russia on your dicks.
You cannot cross the same river even once, said the Dnipro River.
Gospodi. There is no going back. Naked aggression comes
in the form of Russian airstrikes on civilians. Putin is a whore-
cum-war criminal dressed in his Sunday-best despotic czar fatigues.
Ukrainian soldiers are bringing their cats to the Russian front.
Grannies lying on yoga mats, lock & load & aim their AK-47s.
Meanwhile, in the Kyiv subway-stations-cum-bomb-shelters,
babies are being born, a set of twins, oldtimers play chess,
mothers & children make Molotov cocktails with laundry soap
for sticky fire, while a million refugees flee their homeland.
There really is no going back.
Checkmate. Crimes against humanity. Rust and iron curtains.
The colors of the Ukrainian flag
are emblazoned on every bridge & every public building
the world over, as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity,
dusting off the dulcet words of democracy & freedom for Ukraine.
Babushki offer bread and salt and sweet tea to the defecting soldiers
while Putin sends a bouquet of missiles to the city Kherson, COD.
A Russian soldier wrote to his mother, I am in the Ukraine,
This is not an exercise, we have bombed all the cities.
They are throwing themselves beneath our wheels,
they don’t want us here, Mama, this is so hard,
just moments before he was killed.
As Lew Welch said, This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.
The babushka hands young Russian soldiers handfuls of seeds, saying,
Put these sunflower seeds in your pockets, please.
You will lie down here with the seeds.
You came to my land. You are occupiers.
Do you understand? You are enemies.
Fucking pieces of shit.
This is the last place, there is nowhere else left to go.
They have already lain down their bodies & souls.
For the seeds of freedom are the only crop
that will surely grow in black Ukrainian earth.
A vast army of sunflowers tracks the sun.
Slava Ukraini!
2 March, 2022 From our CPITS Write On class, with Susie Terence
