A FAR AWAY COUNTRY

When the images caught on someone’s iPhone

of a shelled apartment block in a Kyiv

suburb and a woman sweeping up

shards of glass on a balcony that has

only been partially destroyed, or the piles

of rubble in Kharkiv city centre

that might be Aleppo, Fallujah, Dresden,

change to scorched family cars on littered roads

with snow falling, sometimes on the skyline

are deciduous trees and, clinging

to their leafless branches, silhouetted,

near perfect spheres of mistletoe, ‘omela’

in Ukrainian and in Russian. Each spring,

the mistle thrushes, impervious,

return for the berries.