From Maia Mikhaluk in Kyiv (497th day): On June 27th ruzzian missile attack injured and killed people in Kramatorsk. Victoria Amelina, 37-year-old Ukrainian writer’s life was cut short by that terrorist attack.
One of Victoria’s short poems gave me goosebumps and brought tears to my eyes:
An air raid.
An air raid is on throughout the country.
It’s as if we are being led to an execution,
All of us.
But they aim only at one,
Mostly at the one on the edge.
Today it was not you.
The air raid is over. All clear.
In Ukrainian:
Тривога
Повітряна тривога по всій країні
Так наче щоразу ведуть на розстріл
Усіх
А цілять лише в одного
Переважно в того, хто скраю
Сьогодні не ти, відбій
Voice of Ukraine 
2 responses to “7/6/2023 – A poem from a fallen Ukrainian writer”
J.R.R.Tolkien
30 April 1944
…I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days—quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil—historically considered. But the historical version is, of course, not the only one.
All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ’causes’ and ‘effects’. No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitaris [(in light of the eternal)]. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives.
And though we need all our natural human courage and guts (the vast sum of human courage and endurance is stupendous, isn’t it?) and all our religious faith to face the evil that may befall us (as it befalls others, if God wills) still we may pray and hope. I do.
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“The Lord Himself shall descend with a shout
with the trumpet of the archangel
and the dead in Christ shall rise first.
Then those of us who are alive and remain
shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air
and so shall we ever be with the Lord”.
Paul, 1 Thesselonians 4
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