NVN Monday: GOODBYE, KYIV
by Donald Sellitti
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Goodbye, Kyiv and thank you for the chance to stand in solidarity with you at safe remove to write of you with passion and with anger in my slanted rhymes. I cared a lot, I really did, and bared my heart in lines I broke in unexpected places, taking risks you wouldn’t understand. You’re not a poet. I was just as brave as you. The moving zeitgeist though has moved and left you far behind as winds of war have blown again and lauded us with new and fresher outrage for the dead and dying. My anger needs new tinder, not the charcoal of your cities, for its burning. I’m back inside my garden now where themes of death and inhumanity present themselves in quaint and small tableaux. A newly fallen tree; a spider that I’d stepped on carelessly with one leg tapping. Death is all around me as it is with you. I might write of you again, Kyiv, if something fresh emerges from the blandness of unending war, a bomb as blinding as the sun perhaps, awash in metaphor. But for now, goodbye Kyiv. Best wishes for the future, really.
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Donald Sellitti honed his writing skills as a scientist/educator at a Federal medical school in Bethesda, MD before turning to poetry following his retirement. Numerous publications in journals with titles such as Cancer Research and Oncology Letters have been followed by publications in journals with titles like The Alchemy Spoon, Better than Starbucks, and Rat’s Ass Review, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize in 2022.