Yesterday I wondered if they celebrate February 14 as Valentine’s Day in Ukraine.  I consulted the Oracle, no longer at Delphi.  The answer: yes they do.  That it is possible to celebrate love when surrounded by serried ranks of armor, self-propelled artillery, motorized infantry seemed a truly human image of resistance.  We ought to lift high our candle no matter how great the darkness.

A video clip – Russian army taking positions on  border of Ukraine.

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Finally, a poem that is ‘on point’ concerning our human predicament.  Life lived on a wire…

Why So This Quiet

by Carl Phillips

            Dog lifts his leg to piss on the bull briar; pisses;
and up from the twists and thorns flies a ghost moth,
two of them, three, moving like an abandoned
but still persuasive, still shifting argument,
            until as usual they move how they move, even as
the field’s edge means the edge of the field, not
the shadow-stitched perimeter of childhood
            where someone’s explaining to me all over again
“A whip is not a lasso,” losing patience,
while someone else strikes a match, sets fire
                         to a box of maple leaves—desire—“No,
                         the leaves are what desire looks like, not how it feels.”

Copyright © 2022 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 16, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.