Friday, February 25
FOR THE JOURNALISTS WHO WRITE ABOUT UKRAINE
After Steven Lee Myers and Alison Smale's
March 2014 article in the New York Times,
"Russian Troops Mass at Border with Ukraine"
Only use familiar
turns of phrase: the crisis
between the Kremlin and the West.
Use quantitative words—excessive,
full-scale, massive, mass—an urgency,
that like a horse or dog, you'll tame.
Use metaphors of temperature
—erupting, heat, a flash point—
simple hots, like oil or flame,
to echo a named winter, a cold
that never ended.
Build potential gravity
like an asteroid's
pull towards what will burn it
down to dust, the threat
of a deep rupture—impervious
to anger and to breach,
the chernozem split
wide and wild and
reaching. And then
discuss the territorial
integrity of this. Interrogate
and pin its body:
logical male rushing nation
or hysteria-filled okraina,
female border.
Pin, restrain it
—immutable—
then strip it down
to claim you understand
the workings of this land,
the place where river-bones
meet coal-soil skin. Call it
catastrophe
for Ukraine and pretend
omission lacks intent. The article
not present in the Slavic
will go unnoticed, but when
it rises—as all silence must—
and cracks the Dnepr river's ice,
its howl will wedge between
the blend of air and water:
a heap of fur and frozen blood-bones,
resurfacing, like a litter of kittens
drowned that summer.
(Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach)