Prayer For Ukraine - Elizabeth Herron

[Larry Robinson]

Prayer For Ukraine


The ants have found the honey.
Isn’t that their way?
They can’t help themselves.
The orders come
from the whole, not the parts.
And so there they are, afloat
in the work of a thousand bees.

The fragile footing of my morning --
my breath, my bread and honey
give way 

to the rubble
of a bombed apartment, 
the doorway of a collapsing hospital, 
as bodies lie in fields of snow,
or tumbled into a long ditch
wrapped in black plastic.

Physicists tell us the world is no more 
than a collision of waves or light –
a brief kiss 

that births a moment like this
life or that – a child, a bee, an ant,
one who gives an order
and one who falls --

And who knows 
where tears come from, or exactly how
the ants organize their army,
or how the bees
delirious in blossom 
turn pollen into honey? 

A brief kiss --

one ant seeking another, 
the common rubbing of legs in a hive, 
the whispers of children
holding hands in the dark –

and prayer 

is a resting place, 

the boat I row on a sea of blood
with oars that slip away
in dark water.

	- Elizabeth Herron