Tag: war in Ukraine

pupils playing in the school yard

While obsessing over quiet

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

The shrieks and screams of the school yard across the street broke into the midday
silence of my reading—a clear sign that summer holidays are over. I guess it’s time
to push forward my lunch break given the suddenly noisy purlieu. And I know that
my serious-minded friends discuss storms and wildfires or the ongoing woe of war
in Ukraine while all I do is obsess over the now disturbed quiet of my daily habits,
which is probably not a particularly favourable demeanour, but at least I don’t have
to worry about facing later some hapless casualty—whom I happen to call a friend
or family—of my momentary urge for publicly practised honesty, just because they
appeared in my stanza by chance. Self-absorption as a viable means of protecting
others—who would have thought?

two surreal figures in mourning leaning towards each other over the cracked earth

In the name of

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Reduced to a poem, to a world in terms of words, if only read like a distant memory
of the Lost Generation—witnesses of Verdun and the Somme—it can still shake off
the thoughts of cluster bombs and grain tanks hit by missiles in the port of Odessa.
But forced by the bare-chested madman to stop fantasising about the end of history,
the world may face the end of itself, ordered from a secret nuclear bunker in the name
of that same history.