Saturday’s New Verse News: A CHURCH ON UKRAINE’S EASTERN FRONT
by Suzanne Morris
Fighters from Ukraine’s Karpatska Sich Battalion in a church on Dec. 25 that was destroyed by shelling and reportedly looted by Russian forces during their occupation, in the Lyman district in the Donetsk region. Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
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The Church is torn from limb to limb daylight flooding through gaping holes in hallowed walls Russian spies posing as monks and priests and nuns and at least one Ukrainian abbot convicted of espionage. So I wonder about the soldier in combat gear entering through an arched door wrested from its hinges, glass blown out his heavy boots crunching on the pulverized pieces littering a floor thickly layered with shell dust below a magisterial portrait of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, looking heavenward as if to beseech God for an explanation for this violent schism between two branches that grew from the same root, for the shell holes that pock the background of the star-speckled sky above his haloed head and the rock he kneels against to pray. Jewel-toned paraments embroidered in gold are strewn about the floor and flung against the high upholstered back of a filigreed chair while the Virgin Mary enfolded in deep blue and rose ponders in her heart from high above: For this, my son died on the cross? Nearby, the wooden altar with elaborate detail is deeply scarred, panels missing its top piece knocked awry and all around, sections of towering, frescoed walls blown out, the portraits adorning them ripped, iconography broken and dangling. The soldier’s head is bowed as though he has escaped for a few moments of prayer within this tattered sanctuary. Or, perhaps he has come to search for evidence of treason: lists of people to be killed, wads of illicit cash, pamphlets of Russian propaganda to be traced so that justice can be served. And all the while the raging war hurtles into its second year...
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Suzanne Morris is a novelist and a poet. Her poems have appeared in online poetry journals including The New Verse News, The Texas Poetry Assignment, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pinecone Review, and Emblazoned Soul Review.