I remember the first time I was stung
by a bee. I was six. It was my Russian
cousin Olga’s birthday party. Suspended
in the airless dark we waited for her to blow
the candles out. Smoothing the itchy collar
of my summer dress I felt a stab of pain.
I remember an innocent walk in the black
rain of Chernobyl to the fun fair in town.
We joked about wet clothes, scoffed candy
and Coke, ignored the creaks and groans
of old machines. We clung white-faced
to the safety rail as we spun on the waltzer.
Today I stare at the daffodils on my table.
They clamour from their vase, gaudy petticoats
flapping a can-can at a funeral. In Kyiv
sandbags not flowers line the streets. A blast
of golden cluster bombs, pools of pus and piss
in field hospitals, yellow wheat fields smoulder
a band of war on the sky blue flags of home.
In the deserts of Mariupol, walls claw at the sky
and bones burn pale as newborns.
Servants of time, my daffodils will shrivel,
lose lustre like the crepe skin of an ageing chorus
girl. The badlands will birth new blooms.
The Purple Hermit 
How very difficult it must be for you to see these things.
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🙏🌹🥰
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As always, a powerful and memorable piece, Nikita, with its timeline of vivid imagery. I have nothing positive to say about the world. Humanity seems to be teetering on the edge of returning to a new brutal medieval age, the anti-renaissance.
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Glad you enjoyed the poem. It took a lot of editing. An emotional subject. It’s hard to retain Hope the way things are going. I agree it feels like regression to some sort of Neo Fascism, a new World Order.
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Yes, and the nightmare much closer for you. Some days I want to curl up under the desk, other days I appreciate the birds in the backyard, the small things.
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In the end it is the little things that matter the most. I have a family of seagulls living on the rooftop outside my hospital window. They’re lovely. Yesterday a white feather blew into my room and it felt like the most beautiful of things.
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