Things could be worse

I could be much worse.

Stranded in Cork Airport,

eating sausages

and potato cakes,

dried white pudding

and fried bacon slices,

chilled orange juice

with Americano by Nescafé.

A disaster of a flight to Manchester,

a swollen little throbbing toe,

a lame gait.

I could be much worse.

I could be frozen in Ukraine,

maimed in Ukraine,

my home destroyed in Ukraine.

Parched , starved, wounded, blind, deaf,

I could be a nightmare

walking from gutter through ice & mud,

past unmilked cows,

crippled donkeys,

chickens ready for wolves,

wet with weather that would drown an earthworm,

excremental trudge to the border

between

“Saturn Devouring His Son Peter”,

and some hope of at least an annual salvation.

I could be “The Scream”

on a bus from Mariupol,

from the shipyard in Mykolayiv,

leaving Freedom Square in Kharkiv,

I could be the last scream left living in Kyiv,

Lviv to Poland, to Germany,

into Rumania, Moldova, Lithuania, Estonia

– children lifeless behind me,

my lover lost.

I could be much worse.

I could be pulling the trigger

that’s dispatching the missile

into that apartment block,

and only leave a legless cat alive

to drown in blood.

I could be commanding my officers

to annihilate the opposition,

to obliterate all living humans

that stand in our way,

to invade the land of independence

and putrefy the landscape with tyranny.

I could be much worse.

I could be Vladimir Putin’s mother,

keening my infant’s fall from grace.

I could be stranded with Dante in the Kremlin,

in the dark Earth

where there is no peaceful place

⁃ except the grave.

I could be much worse.