I am pleased to share that my poem was shortlisted by The Phare literary magazine’s WriteWords 2022 (though it feels a little odd to say “pleased,” given the subject-matter of the poem).

I am not a poet. I read poetry and I am in awe. Amanda Gorman, Emily Dickinson, friend Bill Denham. Friend June Denham, whose light we recently lost.

Like so many others, I read the news of Russia’s bombing of a maternity hospital and found myself utterly wordless. Not “at a loss for words.” Wordless. Stripped of any way to think of or speak of the unspeakable act. This poem grew in me like a dark flower.

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Do you think he knew
as he flew
with a belly full of darkness?

(Does rhyming make it poetry
Instead of atrocity?)

I like to think he missed the red cross on the roof.

Daydreaming of the unassuming arrow
the crocus makes before it blooms
in his neighbor’s garden,
the potential for color and fertility and beauty hiding in the soil,
until the sun calls it out, until its time arrives, and

Anticipating the riot of sweet and sour and salt assaulting his tongue
in the solyanka his sister promised to make him when he returned
because she’s found a way to make it without meat since
he’s vegetarian, and

Remembering the time his mother kissed his scraped knee,
her lips touching the blood and dirt and little strips of skin
—the first and last time in his life a kiss really
did make it all better.

Tangled in his thoughts like a cat ensnared
in a ball of yarn, a plaything turned trap,
I hope he never saw the target
before he pushed the button.

(Or is it a lever? A knob? A verbal command? A swipe left, or right?
How does one dispense death these days?)

Because the knowing is unbearable.

2022 All Rights Reserved Shari Lane

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As many of you know, we recently welcomed our first grandchild into the world. I am certainly all the more sensitive to an attack on new mothers and newborn babies, but I don’t believe you have to be a new anything to be unspeakably horrified by this act.

It’s not as if this is a novel event. All around the world children are the - largely unintended - victims of violence. The news is full of stories of the suffering of children in Yemen, at the US’s southern border, in Palestine . . . . What makes the March 3 incident stand apart is that it appears the Ukrainian maternity hospital was specifically targeted.

Which is why I hope the pilot didn’t know.

#istandwithukraine #poetryislife #brillig #pharelitmag #sharilane