Early last week my daughter, Miss 17 and her friend Miss 15 decided they’d each write a poem about the same topic. And then Russia invaded the Ukraine and that became their theme.

Miss 15’s Poem

The ambers blow an Autumn wind
That whispers of Wintry change
The inevitable repetition of us
Four seasons ago the same
Something stirs in the Autumn pond
Rises from the horizon sea
Whether fiery sun or cold moon it be
Or kraken waking tentacles green
Time will tell if we must see
I hope it shows it will end soon

Miss 17’s Poem

When all about you have given in,
When none have had the sense to say
What should be said and done;
When the mightiest words are left unsaid,
And the strongest of the sons of men
Go dumb into the dark,
Trampling in the dust and rights of men,
Then remember us:
We are the dead.

While we watch and wait,
Justice with her shuttered eyes
Sits in pomp and state, the drowsy stillness
Of the hooded dark
Blinding the world blood red.
Outrageous as the sea,
A vast immeasurable abyss
Of hate and love and war,
Death and his dancing footmen
Fly over the world, blackening our sight
With their hate-filled wings.
Officials in their clouded rooms
Move their mouths and utter words,
Clutching their internal peace
With dumb-struck hands.
The vulture sits in his palace,
He clasps his guns with crooked hands,
Muzzle to a nation
Of the dying and the living and the dead.
The mightiest words were left unsaid
And the strongest of the sons of men
Went dumb into the dark,
And ere the eve the bird had set
Fear on the kings of the world.

The wolf in his golden crypt,
With hands of clay and a heart of stone,
Fears that with one more word
The slave would be more than the free,
That the stars would be under the sea.
While he stores up the sand
And lets the gold go free,
The dead in their clouded tombs,
The living in their silent boxes watch on
And say that it cannot be done.
Their hands are as sludge,
Their hearts are as rock,
Their ears but once hear
And forever ignore. Where is the honour
That turns a heart from shame?
A tiger’s fool, round and round
In the world they go,
These broken wings of democracy,
While the birds of prey
Our gaudy dreams deny.

On a hill above a town
The bird surveys his work,
The gunman’s scorching track,
Unloading hell behind him step by step,
These fields of ash and ruin.
In this enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Come up along a winding road the noise of a Crusade.
It is a ghostly march of liberty
Upon a crimson pavement,
From hundreds of the mouthless dead,
Bloody but unbow’d, with postcards in the sky
They wordlessly shout;
‘Should we ask it of the ash and stone,
Of the fire and brimstone,
Of the hungry vulture with the bloodied claws,
When the world does not respond?
When God gives you a face
Do you not make yourself another?
We are the dead and we are fading,
But the living are waiting for the dawn!’

We read Prisoners of Geography last year and the author’s chapter on Russia was very perceptive. It explains much about Russia’s viewpoint and ambitions.