In this new month of a new year, Russia’s criminal assault on Ukraine rumbles on. Our poet Aoife McClellan sees poor Mad Nastasiya, dancing among the ashes of the dead. It is Day 763 of the Daily Poems. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has now lasted 1,046 days.
Nastasiya’s song
They call me Mad Nastasiya, but it means reborn.
I dance barefooted with the silent dead.
Look: songs lie in their mouths like snowfalls,
or white communion bread. I’ll take and eat,
and sing their songs, to set their spirits free
The whirling snowflakes settle on my tongue.
They say I’m crazed by war, my brains are turned,
by bitter searing blasts from Russian steppes
because I know no enemy and wear a crown
of cornflowers, daisies, sunflowers on my head,
dried flowers whispering of summer skies.
Among the dust, I find my mother’s hand.
Her golden wedding-ring; nail-polish, scarlet, chipped
Between her fingers, living snowdrops spring –
her bride’s bouquet – she clutches it.
Wind turns among the splintered houses.
Flinging a hail of ashes, fragments of the dead,
harsh, feathery drifts of skin and bone,
see how the grey snow blinds and covers me,
my hands, my face, my open eyes.
I taste the salty grit of mother, father, sister. Souls
scatter in storm-blown leaves, rustling messages of death.
But listen harder, how their susurration speaks of meadows,
rippling in the winds of Spring, turning silver, green!
Great, tall, trees, skirts blown by invisible spirit: they dance, too, over the plains.
Soon sunflower seeds will blossom from the pockets of the dead.
Aoife McClellan