RICH BLACK EARTH

 

A Poem for the People of Ukraine

Bomb the walls till they are rubble;
Bomb the rubble till it’s bricks;
Bomb the bricks till they are pebbles;
Bomb the pebbles till they’re sand—
But grains of sand are numberless,
Riding the wind, enduring sun, unthirsting,
Grand in dunes, erasing kingdoms,
Grinding engines to a halt,
Counting time in timeless rivers,
Becoming pearls in oyster shells.

We are the people,
A timeless reckoning like sand,
Hard and myriad like pebbles,
Blocks for building like the bricks,
Scarred and witnessing like rubble,
Rising mighty like the walls—
Hymn and culture, ritual,
Palace, plaza, aqueduct, maidan,
Legend, testament, and creed;
We are Kyiv and Kharkiv, Mariupol,
Warsaw, London, Sarajevo,
Nanking, Masada, Leningrad;
Once we were Tenochtitlan.

You are Ozymandias, and we are sand
And song—
You are the stones removed and cast away,
And we the rich, black earth. 

Frederic S. Durbin – American

Painting: Alex Kalenyuk- Ukraine