NVN Sunday: LAND MINES

by Tricia Knoll

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The Biden administration has approved supplying Ukraine with American anti-personnel mines to bolster defenses against Russian attacks as Ukrainian front lines in the country’s east have buckled, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday. —The New York Times, November 20, 2024

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I hear those words and think of Diana
in head gear walking in Angola,
 
facing pitfalls and explosives
as she walked for peace. 
 
I hear those words and remember that rat
Magawa who won a gold medal for sniffing,
 
alerting and the giant Gambian pouch rats
that followed, searching for buried armaments, 
 
whom handlers named Harry Potter and Godiva. Rats
that live nine years, a good training investment. 
 
Battlefields laced with mines to remove legs and end lives,
in places distant from me – Iran, Iraq, Sudan,
 
Syria, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, and more
My country never a signatory to the treaty
 
to prohibit them. The cost to make a mine
one hundredth of the cost to remove. 
 
I thought of land mines and never thought
my people would plant them 
 
in fields sowed for sunflowers.  

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Tricia Knoll has no great love for rats, having lived with a few, but respects the capabilities of  pouched rats. Her work appears widely in journals and nine publications, either full-length books or chapbooks. She is a Contributing Editor to the online poetry journal Verse Virtual. She is grateful to The New Verse News for allowing her to write feelings that the news of today sparks.