by Gail Hosking

Dante and Plato in the Ukraine

 
I never carried a weapon.
Never joined the army.
I’ve only seen what comes home
stuck to a uniform like burrs. 

Still, I know demolished buildings and
one-armed men. The hungry in striped pajamas.
I know war travels to the domestic.
Men in bed, after all, cannot disentangle 
from men in war. How will love speak?
Only the dead have seen the end.

The Space Between


Living near Dachau, my father insisted
I look at the photographs while
the Holocaust stretched like a shadow 
that had already dismantled the world
as I knew it. The future had no guarantees 
with the Iron Curtain down the road. 
Today in a house by the shore, I sit in the future 
watching the tide, keeping track of the sun 
and the moon. A flag waves in a neighbor’s yard. 
A red-throated loon crosses the sky, all grace 
and silence. Fear reappears like seaside sparrows 
when the news of Ukraine covers the airwaves 
and the Russians destroy land they insist they own. 
Hungry children dig through rubble. Shopping 
lists burn in fires. I live now on that steep cliff 
between past and future. I watch a plane 
overhead as a mourning dove sits on the backyard 
fence and demands I listen.  Gulls dive down. 
The tide rolls in again.

Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter and a book of poems, Retrieval. Essays and poems have appeared in such places as South Dakota Review, Post Road, The Alfred Sun, Tar River Poetry, West Trade Review, and Reed Magazine. Gail has an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. Another book of poems, Adieu, will be out in the spring of 2024.