There would be

The tomatoes constellated with salt and sliced in half Deftly a cardiac surgeon glides his scalpel through your heart

Through Varenyky and sour cream dreamed on plate after plate Your food was edible music

The rolling pin a conductor’s baton or More often a billy club

Tsyotsya you shooed me from the kitchen The way you shooed chickens on the collectivised farm

The pines wept resin over that post war famine… Later I heard you praying stood in the rhombus of moonlight

Angled over the kitchen where you slept on a campbed The night slicing your shape in half

Your head the moon’s pitted dark side… Oh how the Madonna would weep tears of blood

As the apricots noiselessly dropped on the streets of your town The summer’s soft bombs,

Over Ukraine now: if only your whisper had reached God Above the Steppe through ampitheatres of cloud

No one watches the cities erased from the map A people tippexed out

Your body dents the white sheet Your face the Braille of love

I read with dry lips and inhale Turning bitter as sourdough

Warm as an autumn dusk your smell.