Sandy Solomon: After the Invasion

Cut salami on the counter,
greasy knife beside it,
wrapper lolling like
a tongue. We left it there
when the sirens screamed.
Suck of explosions—fuel
dump, we told ourselves
in our cold basement bunker.
Then somewhere closer.
The kids first were crying,
then whimpering—
beyond understanding,
how suddenly you went.

Cut salami on the counter
shoved into the backpack
with what we could carry.
In lulls, we returned to range
through rubble, to search beside
the blown bedroom wall
for traces of who we were
before, when our kids
seemed so much younger,
happily playing
under the plane trees.

Sweetest peace, place
your gentle hand on
our shoulders again back
home in Ukraine. Let us
sit outside again
in spring, sit together
again with friends we’re missing,
let us shop for fruit
or cheese in a known language!

We have lit a candle
to you, whom we took
for granted as the children
squabbled, as the day’s
chores fuddled us forward
toward our nightly sleep,

burdens that seemed so light
from there below the building,
or there on uncovered paths,
as we carried our kids out,
there where shells fell,
where we hit the ground,
there where we crowded
near the tracks counting
and recounting kids,
cases, slices of bread,

so many hours awake,
so many hours awaiting
the train we couldn’t board,
so many hours more
to cram into a carriage,
so much cold, so many
hours short of water,
so many miles, so long
the border between war’s
pound, its fires, our husbands,
fathers, brothers in arms,

and the sudden silence without,
even the kids gone quiet
as the train clacked and shrugged
towards ordinary sounds—
a car, a laugh on the street.
Under your care,
sweetest peace, we write:
so many tears for all
we left, our lost lives,
cut salami on the counter.

Copyright 2024 Sandy Solomon.

Sandy Solomon‘s poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker and The New Republic. Her book Pears, Lake, Sun won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She teaches at Vanderbilt University.