Eureka Series: Dark Eyes, An Elegy for Ukraine
Andrena Zawinski
Today's poem is by Andrena Zawinski
Dark Eyes
An Elegy for Ukraine
…whatever I do / will become forever what I've done.
—Wislawa Szymborska
The girl’s family gathers at the kitchen table,
her box of colored pencils and pad of paper
that praised the beauty of nightingales in trees
packed away with a book of verse and trident
charm wrapped inside a silky blue-yellow flag.
Potatoes simmer on the stove to mash to stuff
pirohi dough. But now they make molotov cocktails,
fill shell casings, balk at air raid sirens and booms
in a blood red sky bleeding down on stuffed satchels
made ready to cross some border, any border.
The girl’s Baba, just outside the window, braves
a soldier, hands him a fistful of sunflower seeds,
implores him to put down his gun to plant them.
While others deliver curses and spells, she sings
“Ochi Chyornye,” the street thickening with a fog
of ghosts who have come, who are about to come.
Copyright © 2025 Andrena Zawinski All rights reserved
from Born Under the Influence
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission
Andrena Zawinski’s poems have received accolades for free verse, lyricism, spirituality, and social concern. Her fourth full-length poetry collection is Born Under the Influence. Previous collections include Landings, a PEN Oakland Award book Something About, and a Kenneth Patchen Prize Traveling in Reflected Light along with several smaller collections. She is a veteran teacher of writing and activist poet born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA who has made the San Francisco Bay Area her home.
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