On the War in Ukraine
On the War in Ukraine
Poem after "On the war in Vietnam" by Göran Sonnevi (1965).
"On the War in Ukraine" is inspired by Göran Sonnevi's legendary poem "On the War in Vietnam". Sonnevi's poem entered the Swedish vocabulary and helped change public opinion in Sweden. You can read the Swedish original here.
ON THE WAR IN UKRAINE
The fog is stuck to the Gjerrebogen-hills.
Rooftops are mirrored in a monochrome haze.
The spire of Moss church pokes into the white book
documents of white noise.
Small children stream to school in front of my house
feet, arms, voices, life
a football bounces.
On the screen behind the cracked protective plastic
Xi Jinping descends the stairs from
Air China's Boeing 747
visiting his closest friend in Moscow.
The neighbor rolls his bike out of the garage.
Will spring never come? he lightly exclaims.
I check the mailbox, there is nothing.
How many times have I checked my phone
while writing this poem?
The width of the river Bakhmutka in the city of Bakhmut
a killing zone where bodies pile up in heaps.
Children are separated from their parents and transported
into the empire along train lines that no rationality can follow.
I think I hear women's cries:
Mothers are held captive in sheds and forced to be naked.
This morning, the UN's climate panel published
the latest report to be released while
the world can still reach the 1.5-degree target.
The sun is not even a slightly brighter patch in the fog.
I hang from my legs over a gray sea and wait to fall.
The neighbor at the back of my house, an old man who lives alone
will not lie with his legs out of the bush
and a congealed bullet hole in the back of his head.
The girls diagonally across the road will not be raped
according to the doctrine of maximum destruction.
Numbness towards the pain of others is a citizen's duty.
Here where I live - in Moss and its surroundings - there is no one
who reads Putin's dissertation on Slavic history
or thinks about Colin Powell's smoking gun in Iraq
as (anything other than) an attempt to manipulate the future.
The documents of war are not white papers
but dreams dripping with body-warm blood.
Gjerrebogen has disappeared in thick fog.
The church spire above the city is gone in the white haze.
Only what is closest to me has contours.
A magpie lifts from the birch crown and flutters over the road.
Biden stumbled on the airplane stairs and almost fell to the ground.
Putin and Xi ate pavlova for dessert.
Is the white fog the frightening clarity of dreams?
Here is the earth the children will inherit.
Eight billion want harmony between problem and solution.
The thought is unbearable for Putin, Xi, and Biden/Trump.