Between Ash and Snow
War has a way of clawing through time, dragging the past into the present and stitching wounds that span generations. When I finished Occasional Ballad, I never imagined it would find itself resurrected in the shadow of a new war. It was written as a lament, a howl for those nameless boys crucified by history, for mothers wailing under an indifferent sky. I wrote of Agamemnons and Ulysses-like figures pulling nations apart, of Christlike faces disappearing into anonymity. And though the verses were bound in Poland’s soil — its own long history of blood and sacrifice—their echoes rang tragically clear as news poured in from Ukraine in the spring of 2022.
I was not in Ukraine during this war, though I had been there before—long ago, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Kyiv’s streets then were quieter, the people stoic, the air thick with that post-Soviet disorientation shared by so many Eastern European countries. I wandered between markets and courtyards, a younger man with no understanding of how fragile peace could be. My connection to Ukraine had always been a personal one: my father’s mother, an unwavering Ukrainian woman, had married my Polish grandfather, a colonel whose life revolved around uniformed duty and tightly kept order. She brought stories, traditions, a gentler cadence to the sharp consonants of my Polish childhood. There were times I wondered whether her voice echoed the grief of generations past — the same grief that now trembled through Ukraine’s streets as Russian tanks rolled across borders in 2022.
When Bucha and Irpin entered the world’s vocabulary, I could not write. I remember staring at the reports, the images — families shot point-blank in basements, corpses strewn along streets, hands tied with crude twine behind their backs. At first, I tried to look away, but how can one unsee the grotesque contortion of human dignity, the frozen expressions of civilians robbed of both life and peace? The war, the atrocities — these were not merely news reports. They were echoes of a poem I had written years before, words I thought were safely buried within history’s pages.
“Here, every nameless face bears Christ’s visage…”
These lines from Occasional Ballad became unbearable to me in those weeks. Each face from Bucha, from Irpin, carried the unmistakable weight of that line. Each frozen figure, buried hastily or left to rot, seemed to possess that same martyrdom — nameless, crucified, stripped of youth and breath. When I wrote those words, I had imagined Poland’s long history of rebellion and war, our fields littered with nameless graves, mothers who had already buried too much hope. But war does not belong to the past, does it? It remains a beast lurking just beyond the firelight, waiting for its chance to tear the fabric of lives once more.
I recall seeing a photograph from Irpin: a child’s stuffed animal discarded in the mud, its arms splayed, its smile grotesquely cheerful in the wreckage. It was not unlike the image of my own words — “We need children — not Christs!” I had written this line as a plea, a demand for life over sacrifice, for hope over ruin. And yet, as mothers dragged their children to shelter under relentless shelling, it seemed the choice had been stolen from them. In war, youth is the first offering on the altar of violence, whether they hold a rifle or a doll.
Ukraine’s suffering felt visceral to me not only because of my family’s roots but because of the legacy of Eastern Europe itself. To live in this part of the world is to inherit a history that drips with blood. We are the children of barricades and revolts, of empires rising and falling, of homes lost and names erased. “That youth — though it loves life dearly — / Finds its end most often in death’s embrace.” These words of mine were as much about the boys of Bucha as they were about the generations that had come before. In Irpin, the young fought to defend their streets, their neighbors, their land, knowing full well that heroism often walks hand-in-hand with a violent, unmarked grave.
And what of the mothers? “Weep for the fate of mothers! They are as willows, / Their fingers severed, reaching still to a pale, unanswering sky.” I remember my father speaking of his mother’s hands — my Ukrainian grandmother’s — strong yet gentle, always holding a book or gathering the world in her quiet embrace. She was an officer’s wife; she understood the weight of what she had chosen. Her hands were both shield and cradle, steady and tender, the kind of hands that held families together, that carried burdens without complaint. She was a woman of endurance, her hands symbols of creation and care, but I have no doubt they also knew grief. Now, I picture those same hands reaching skyward — empty, trembling, desperate — like the mothers of Bucha, of Mariupol, of Kharkiv. What solace can the sky possibly offer when children lie buried in shallow pits?
It is impossible to think of Ukraine without recalling its long, scarred history. From Holodomor to Chernobyl, from Soviet purges to the Orange Revolution, Ukraine has lived under the boot of Agamemnons and Ullyses alike — figures who pull the nation in opposite directions, leaving only suffering in their wake. And yet, even as war cleaves lives and homes apart, there remains something stubborn and eternal in its soil. The women, the mothers, the matronly love of which I wrote — “And only the women’s fidelity — / The matron’s love, unbroken — / Allows you to press the crown of heroism / Upon your brow…” — it is this quiet endurance that holds nations together when men are called to war.
When I wrote Occasional Ballad, I believed I was speaking to the past, to ghosts long silenced, to boys who had died for names carved on monuments no one reads. I now understand that the poem was not just a reflection on memory, but a warning. War is not a relic. It waits, like winter beneath the soil, ready to bloom in crimson.
In those spring days of 2022, as Ukraine bled, I found myself recalling the frozen fields I had once crossed in my youth — visits that now felt worlds away. I thought of the birches of Smolensk, far across the border in Russia, beneath which lie tens of thousands of Polish officers, murdered with a single shot to the back of the head. I thought of the ash, the frost, and the unbearable weight of a shared history that stretches across generations. I was not standing in Ukraine then, but I carried its grief as if it were my own.
And so, as a poet, what am I to do? My words are not a balm. They cannot resurrect the dead or rebuild the ruins. And yet, still, I write. “For even the scarred horizon should be seen.” To witness, to speak, to give form to silence — this, I think, is the task of those of us who hold pens instead of weapons. If Occasional Ballad is my only offering, let it be a testament, a lament, and a refusal to forget.
In war, memory becomes sacred. And I will remember. I will write. For Bucha, for Irpin, for every mother who weeps and every child whose life was stolen. I will keep the flame alive, not out of hope but out of duty — to the dead, to the living, and to the unrelenting truth of history.
OCCASIONAL BALLADAnd now — weep! If you knew not how to weep
In the mournful hour of black steeds,
Bound in silvered harness,
Then weep! For only sorrow can endure the tempered hoof,
And only the broken-hearted will tread
Over ice’s brittle crust, and cross it still above.
With frozen hands buried in the plume-tipped manes,
Their faces pressed to the heads of their mounts,
For one last gallop, they chase across the cracking snow —
A soul freed from flesh, wandering, seeking
Through twisted roads and brambled paths.
Draped in barricades long gone cold,
In the last exhale of crucified boys.
Here, every nameless face bears Christ’s visage,
And dreams His martyr’s death through suffocating nights.
And this, too, is a cruel temptation,
For they cast themselves into it,
Laying their youth like ripened stalks before the scythe’s sharp edge.
And the blade cuts deep while harvest feeds its bloodied mouths,
As mothers wail — lungs devoured by cries,
Cursing the ruinous landscape of defeat.
We need children — not Christs!
We need men!
So weep for the fate of mothers! They are as willows,
Their fingers severed, reaching still to a pale, unanswering sky.
Weep for the nameless graves, where torrential rains
Will carve and sweep the soil.
When the next spring comes, the infants will crawl to the fields,
And some Agamemnon will cast his net again
Upon the hunchbacked back of freedom.
But here, brother, freedom is but loneliness.
The birds know this well —
The feathered messengers of mothers,
Whose hopes never returned to Ithaca.
Weep, then, for the fate of children —
For a prophet’s omen gnaws at me.
This will not be the first, nor the last, grenade
To bloom a rose upon the frozen underbrush.
I, a simple stone upon the field,
Have known but one truth since ancient sleep claimed me:
That youth — though it loves life dearly —
Finds its end most often in death’s embrace.
This is the mark of the land curled beneath your boot.
One day it turns for an Agamemnon, the next for a Ulysses,
And both will pull in opposite directions,
While only the women’s fidelity —
The matron’s love, unbroken —
Allows you to press the crown of heroism
Upon your brow, a crown long slumbering
In the thorns of a silent, waiting wreath.
*** [You have just read an entry from my poetic diary — a place where I record my reflections and the poems that stir them, or sometimes the other way around, depending on where my inspiration leads and how my creative mood unfolds.]
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