Three journeys to Ukraine, 2014 – 2022.

(First Journey)

Pickled tomatoes and vodka and

Distressingly dill-flavoured chicken in Kiev –

(No, Kyiv, I am told)

In the grey square where

Pictures are posted on the Maidan.

Young people dead too young,

Flinging the defiance of youth

Into the face

Of an old, dead empire

Skeletal fingers clutching still

Around old possessions.

A new energy in an old city,

Older than Moscow

Grander than Russia.

Even the dead can feel envy,

Envy enough to wake the dead.

Near Biden’s black-tinted SUV

As other journalists try to get photos of the VP

Driving away I speak with

A young man in the street, a student at university

In Kyiv.

He is from Crimea and he can

Never go home again.

‘If I go back, I will have to be

Russian

And who wants to be Russian?’

My mate Carson arrives and

Hungover as hell

We catch the train to Kharkiv.

All the journalists have gone down South,

Down to cover all the

Death in the Donbass

And Kharkiv is silent.

No news in the international press

From a city only Pheidippides’ desperate dash

From the Russian border,

With Russian troops massing on the other side.

Surely, there must be a story there.

On the overnight sleeper,

Rattling Eastwards,

A woman tells me West is the future,

West is the hope of waking up bright

After the long nightmare from the East,

Long, long years of

Invasion and oppression,

Rape and murder and famine.

In Kharkiv,

Protests beside Lenin in the square

And bullet holes in the windows

Near where my new friend Alex

Used to work.

And then the Mayor is shot,

Irina (my interpreter) is shocked,

Then springs into action, arranging interviews,

Getting us into the hospital to speak

With the surgeon.

Kernes was shot in broad daylight for

Daring to sway

(Even slightly)

From a previously pro-Russian stance.

We have the story – the only press at all

To show up, even the BBC

Relies on faulty reports from afar, stringers

Saying he was shot in the back.

That evening,

In defiance of the violence in the air,

The young people gather in public gardens,

Laughing

Singing

Sharing a vision for a future far better than

The shooters could ever see.

And I get a byline in the Herald.

(Second Journey)

In Dnipropetrovsk –

(No, Dnipro, I am told) there is

Distressingly dill-flavoured spaghetti

(Fuck me I hate that herb)

And a listing on OLX that catches my

Imagination.

A ragged old Dnipr

With rattling old wheels

Roaring old engine

Rusting old sidecar

Sitting in an old farm shed

Of Victoriia’s family,

Outside the city since 1974.

I buy Gena online for $220,

Just the vehicle to take me

Across the country,

Dnipro to Lviv,

East to West and they don’t let me leave til

Gena is ready.

The boys in the механік

Vova and Vladimir,

Check Gena twice-over and

Check in on Facebook to make sure I

Made it to Poltava and Victoriia

Follows my progress

In posts and photos

All across the country.

Before I leave Dnipro

A pretty girl

(Somewhere in Slovakia I lost the

Notepad holding her name)

Steals my hat and writes a note for me

In a language I cannot read

To show to the police when I get stopped.

She knows Gena will draw attention.

‘Hi – my name is Roderick, and I’m travelling across Ukraine.

Don’t worry that I am smiling so much –

I am not crazy

I am only Australian…’ the note begins

And in Lubny and Kyiv

The police smile,

Then laugh, then let me and Gena

Continue on our way

And I remember her shy sly smile

Wearing my hat

As she writes a joke knowing

I will hear the punchline

Hundreds of kilometres away.

The moon rises above a nameless

Truckstop on the highway

And a hundred gnomes

And giraffes

And fairies

And fibre glass eagles watch from the garden shop next door

As Gena rolls to a dead stop.

A night above a garage

Oil and grease and old parts and morning light

Rising through slats in the floor

And Roma the Master of Motorbikes

Takes Gena apart

Puts him back together and gets him running again.

Roma and his friends race down the rollercoaster hill

In the long summer grass, the bike

Bouncing over the field to

The swimming hole,

Cool water deep

And life is good in the sun.

Finally, at Rivne

Gena could roar no more

Spluttering to a final stop.

And I eat fried hog fat with salt

And drink vodka with pickles

And dance and sing with old army vets

Who remember Afghanistan and By the River of Babylon.

I leave Gena with them

And I hope they get him

Started again

Eventually.

Lviv in summer

Is a place of colours amid the grey.

Artists display their work along the street,

Paintings and drawings

Leaning against the walls of those narrow buildings.

Portraits, classical landscapes, mind-bending abstracts in all colours and

Crude but comical cartoons

Etched in charcoal in the bright sunshine.

It is a place of ideas.

In hundreds of cafes and little bars

Scattered among the winding streets,

The young dreamers and entrepreneurs of the city

Discuss everything from comparative old-world philosophies

To new ways of changing the world online.

Using Internet cables and WiFi

To bypass the old walls around wealth,

Hoarded so jealously by those who already have it.

It is a place of music.

On every street corner,

On every spare space of grass in every park,

Music flowed like blood

Pumping oxygen

Throughout the city,

Played by anonymous virtuosos for a handful of change and

A smile from a passing audience.

I pass by a young woman in a white shirt and purple silk vest

Playing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto n.o. 2,

(Rachmaninoff is Russian but

He got out after a performance in Yalta and

He died in California).

Her fingers dancing swiftly over the keys of an old upright piano,

Wheeled out onto the pavement.

The melancholic melody is

Belied by the happiness in her eyes

As she plays,

Gazing out at her passing audience,

Barely looking down at the keys.

Down the street a hip-hop beat

From a speaker plugged into a smartphone

Kicks in over the top of the piano.

Six young men in blue tracksuits

(Despite the warmth of the afternoon)

Stand in a circle, cheering and laughing and

Clapping wildly.

In the centre of the circle dances a boy half their age,

Perhaps someone's

Younger brother or nephew.

He's dressed in the same blue tracksuit and he drops and

Spins three times on his shoulders

In time with the beat.

He seems to gain speed

As his legs swing through the air,

Before he finally ends up

Spinning around

On his head, to the raucous applause

Of his dance crew.

Further along, the hip-hop beat

Blends with the hum of strings.

A middle-aged man with thinning grey hair

Taps his foot as his bow

Moonwalks Michael Jackson’s 'Beat It'

Across the strings of his violin.

Above it all, the occasional note

Of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto n.o. 2

Can still be heard,

Clear and pure

As the music mingles and flows

Over the cobblestones.

Anastasia is a Russian-speaking

Ukrainian living in Lviv

And laughs at the mere suggestion of Nazi-led

Discrimination of Russian-speakers.

It does not exist, she says. From Kharkiv and Dnipro

to Rivne and Lviv

It simply did not exist.

(Third Journey)

Years don’t pass,

They blend into a life –

Sweet and sour and bitter,

But my blend is sweeter than most,

I hope.

I meet some of my Ukrainians

Around the world.

In Bali: Sergey and Hanna and

Sunsets on the beach in Kuta.

In Mexico: Andrew and Vika and

Sunsets on the beach in Xcalak.

The pandemic grounds me

Two years

In Australia, cut off from my life

Out in the world

Until February and Ukraine is in the news

Again.

Journalism and I have been long parted,

But I still pay attention and Putin

Is calling for invasion and the world seems to think it won’t happen and

I wonder if it is time to take

A third journey to Ukraine.

I ask my friends –

Andrew and Vika are married now

With a little daughter. Andrew thinks Putin is

Playing for influence

Riling up trouble for the sake of it. The

Invasion

Catches them off guard.

Anastasia got out early, already

Escaped to Poland.

I should go to Ukraine but instead

Choose Pakistan.

I have never been to Pakistan and

Australia is having its first cricket tour there

In 24 years in March.

Invasion begins and

Horrors of Bucha unfold

As Paddy Cummins and Uzzie Khawaja

Lead Australia to victory over Babar Azam and Shaheen Shah Afridi

And I cheer in the stands with Amna

And Ahmad and Timmy in Lahore and

The Pakistani crowd cheers with me and everyone

Wants to shake my hand

Because this is the first tour in 24 years and

Because “cricket connects”

As Usama so pithily puts in Karachi with a wide

Smile and the love of Pakistan enfolds me but

I can’t stop remembering Ukraine.

An email from Carson.

He wants to run guns

From Moldova or Slovakia or Poland, getting

Ammunition to fighters running

Out of bullets but

I think he is just drunk and ranting and I don’t go

Back.

The third journey to Ukraine

Unfolds in my mind as I get back to

My life out in the world and there

Is just a whisper a whisper

My mind whispers

‘Coward

Coward

Go back to Ukraine

You coward’.

For 160 days

And more

The third journey unfolds in my mind as

Bombs explode in Lviv

And fires burn in Kyiv

And buildings crumble in Kharkiv and everywhere

Good people die.

As the grasping dead hand of

Undead empire reaches out in smoke

And fire

And horror

And horror

And horror

In Mariupol

In Kherson

In Bucha.

Good people dragged back down into the mud

Churning blood of a

Long-dead creature trying to rise.

As a small bald dying old man,

Dying in the smallest possible way, holding nothing

But power

Kills the hope of

A better future, determined to drag us back

Into darker times

His times

The times he never left

In the cold

Old war

Of his mind.

Some people on Twitter and Facebook and what is

Left

Of the decaying broadsheets and the

Embarrassingly loud news channels, these

Blowhards and grifters and frauds

Say there are two sides to this.

Ask the people in Georgia if the

People in Ukraine were wrong to fear Russia,

Mistaken to look Westward? Ask Irena

Or Dato or Nina in an art studio

Near Marjanishvili and

See the blue-sky and golden-field flags

Flying all over Tbilisi.

Ask Estonia

Ask Latvia

Ask Lithuania

Ask Poland

Ask Finland –

Since you clearly don’t believe it when the

Ukrainians tell you themselves.

Since the horrors of decades of deportations and

Murders and rapes

And Holodomor

And Chernobyl

Are apparently not enough and now

(Apparently) neither are the horrors of 2022.

They are right (in a way)

In their wrongness

When they say there are two sides to this.

There is right.

And there is wrong.

And that is it.

And that is all.

For this poem and many more, you can buy “Cracks In The Walls” on Amazon in either paperback or kindle by following this link.