A Field of Dead Sunflowers

On the road to Novovorontsovka,
Reads the caption to the photo,
Part of this morning’s media essay
On human-on-human violence.

What’s wrong with you that you’re moved
More by this photo of a winter field
Of dead sunflowers than by those
Of elderly humans left behind to scrape by

In shelled houses without heat
Beside destroyed tanks and bridges?
The dead sunflowers could look that bad
On any grey day in any dull winter.

That’s what’s wrong with you.
You sense the underlying weather
And cyclical death below the war,
Below the last pig butchered on a table

By the last farm couple left in Lvove,
The neighbor selling slaughtered chicken
To her older neighbor in Tiahnyka,
The chicken-depleted roosters lined up

On a bench by another shelled house
On another grey winter day. If it were just
That this latest brutal, stupid war
Had blown up out of nowhere yesterday,

Just that the destruction of countryside
By a remotely controlled would-be empire
Was a previously unthinkable crime,
That would be more hopeful. History,

Even, all of it, from the earliest city-state
Tyrants warring for slave-labor dynasties,
Has been brief and could be an aberration
In the long arc of this iron-hearted planet,

But the aging and the hunger, the lives
Living by ending other lives, and under
All of that, the deaths from the weather,
That’s what’s wrong with you, soldier.