Offerings

Rising from my sleep, the Holodomor enters my mind

and now, beset by details of a ghoulish fantasy,

I see myself wearing an overcoat, in warm boots

as I walk across the crystalline dirt of November

on my way to confiscate Ukrainian grain.

The image now shivers. What shall be done when I arrive?

What will be found when I leer inside the hovel, holding my pistol?

It is early still, not truly winter, so the children will not yet

have begun eating one another. Praise to Janus,

that such things will wait for his month. What then?

I have heard that some of the others have taken women,

if they have found them alone; no matter, it is less an evil

to abuse the dead than to scuff the shoes of the living.

When I breach the doorway, it is more likely that I will vigorously laugh

in the manner of a pyramidal overseer (one desert traded for another)

and cruelly knock over a few humble chairs before turning

to make exaggerated searches of an entirely bare cupboard.

I take a long drink of vodka from my flask as I stare into a face,

the eyes that are half a face: a boy younger than four. He is afraid.

-Blessedly I am shaken free of this reverie by the ghostlike figure

in my bed. She makes a sound, resembles Garm having a daydream.

She pulls my right hand into hers, smiles in contentment

and rolls toward the wall, pulling me to her. My left hand

traces down her spine, pausing at the knots that time has tied.

There is a statue in Kiev. It is of bronze or something like it.

There is a little girl and she is very thin and wears a dress

that stretches from the middle of her calves to her neck

and the sleeves fasten mid-forearm and her hair is in braids.

She clasps her hands over her heart and in one of them

she clutches five spikelets of wheat.

She stands on a short concrete pillar with eyes blank like fields

and often red apples fresh from trees encircle her feet.