Leslie Friedman

The Crimean War began in 1853. Why it began is complicated. If someone claims to know the reason for the three-year war, just walk away from that poseur. Russia started it for religious reasons that could lead to gaining territory. Russia wanted to protect Russian Orthodox subjects of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and also protect the Russian Orthodox believers in the Holy Land where there was tension concerning privileges of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. That engaged France. The Ottoman Empire was wearing out; which country would get whose territories if that Empire collapsed?

France, the UK, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia were the allies against Russia.

The devastating war caused about 250,000 deaths; a huge portion was due to disease. England wanted to protect routes to India. France took over Algeria, in 1830; it could expand in North Africa. Russia wanted a warm water port, like Crimea. The Treaty of Paris, 1856, ended the war. Ottoman Turkey remained solid; Russia had to give up southern Bessarabia (Moldova and Romania) and get out of Crimea; the Black Sea was neutralized; the Danube would be open to all countries’ shipping. Russia was not pleased.

Russia invaded Crimea, in 2014. No other country convinced Russia to leave Crimea. In 2022, Russia invaded all of Ukraine.

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis lives in California. She began her attachment to Ukraine by publishing an anthology she curated and edited in October, 2022 “to amplify the voices of Ukrainian writers, and help Ukrainian causes…” The anthology, Sunflowers: Ukrainian Poetry on War Resistance, Hope and Peace, led Kalpna to Volodymyr Tymchuk, poet, writer, and lieutenant colonel in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He became her translator. Translating her poems to Ukrainian also involved the author’s experiences and traditional cultures, particularly of India, the US, and Ukraine.

These are passionate love poems for individuals the author has not met and for a country she has not lived in or traveled to during the creation of the book. The first reading surprised me. It is something different. The author does not work to fit her writing to current poetic trends; the trend that she watches is the death toll of Ukrainians.

She asks “Why would a warrior like to read love poems?” One answer is:  

     A warrior wants to read love poems.

     He wants to carry them in his pockets like seeds of sunflowers,

     Chew on them when famished, and share them with his brothers,

     Who have no one to write love poems for them.  

      A Warrior Wants to Read Love Poems, p 24

Kalpna will address love to an individual, to the nation of Ukraine, or the earth of Ukraine. In “Defending You – a response to “War. Day One” by Lyudmyla Khersonska” she turns war into a visitor to her house.

   The war is at your door and

    I hear a knock on my window.

    I look outside and know what a war looks like.

    It looks like a hungry ghost with a big belly,

    tiny neck, and narrow throat. It wants to eat

    more and  more but can’t swallow anything.

    Thirsty, it pours blood into a chalice

    that has no bottom. Its hunger and thirst

    can’t be satiated.

     But I will open my window

     And let the beast into my home,

    As long as it promises to leave your door.  P 29

Her poem, The Spirit of Ukraine – For President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reveals the deep identification she feels between Ukraine and the invasions and murders of her ancestral society. Hindu and Sikh communities were destroyed by “Muslim conquests.” Her father reminds her that the way to save lives is to surrender, and his way to speak to her categorizes her as an American.

The victory belongs to Ukraine.  

     Defeat is not accepted by its braves.

      I contended with my father when Bucha and Mariupol happened.

      He hinted the enemy is stronger.

      Surrendering is the best option to avoid more violence.

      And after a pause – if YOU won’t step up to the plate.  p 30

Her father distances her from him with the “YOU,” but he uses an American idiom from baseball, “step up to the plate,” showing he also is an American. Kalpna recalls the vicious attacks and the terrifying ways those who were victimized died. She announces her determination to fight the “monster.” 

I must jump into a fire pit

before it touches my body with its bloody hand.

But I knew it wasn’t my father who was speaking to me.

It was his fear and torment. Our ancestors were returning to him.

in his DNA. We were massacred in millions by the murderers 

who marched like fire ants down the mountains of the Hindukush, … p 30

Historically women and children “jumped into the wells lit with flames” rather than be killed by the enemies or raped and “dishonored.” Going back to the experiences of her “ancestors,” leads her into more descriptions of the horrors of war. While she gives love to the Ukrainian army and civilians, she leaves those thoughts to face the bloody reality.

Love Letters to Ukraine immediately reminded me of the English poets of World War I. In the list of pointless wars, World War I is one of the leaders. Rupert Brooke joined the 2nd Naval Brigade, Royal Navy Division, in 1914. His five war sonnets made him famous among literary circles and ordinary readers. He died in 1915. That date is significant when reading his work. The trench warfare had not begun yet. Critiques of Brooke’s work find him sentimental and naïve. And yet, poems of love and nature were favored in the pre-war years. The grisly conditions of the trenches and immense number of deaths changed everything, but Rupert Brooke was gone. Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Winston Churchill admired his poetry. Brooke was sent to Egypt and then to a Greek island. An insect bit him, caused blood poison, and he died.  A strange coincidence: Brooke died near the place where Lord Byron died.

Brooke saw the war as an opportunity for his generation to give up their empty lives. In his poem, The Dead, he compared death to “a shelter that protects its refugees from the horrors of life.” (The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (1915)) Contemplating his own death, he was not sad. He would sacrifice his life for his country. In The Soldier, he wrote:

If I should die, think only this of me

     That there’s some corner of a foreign field

     That is forever England.

Source: Poetry

Kalpna’s love circulates between patriotism and mourning for the dead of Ukraine.
Love: This One Word – to Bucha Massacre, a poem by Ella Yevtushenko

If love was planted in the gardens

by mothers, where their children played,

it could have saved women from dying with

Their mouths filled with sand; those who sang

lullabies to their children and read them the stories

of their glorious land before being raped.

….it could have prevented women from assaults in Bucha and ….

being thrown on the streets, undignified,

rolled in carpets, face down,

after being shot in their heads.

To prepare for war and prevent another Bucha

from happening in any other corner of the earth,

we must be madly in love.  p 62

Even Kalpna questions her desire for a love that can save lives and win battles. In “I Promise,” she expresses her doubts about religious beliefs. “Why were we expelled from heaven if we didn’t eat / The forbidden fruit? Ask God! / ….Until He faces me! Or else there won’t be, / any believers left on earth, I promise! p 92

Wilfred Owen was an English poet who joined the Manchester Regiment, in 1915. He was sent to France, December, 1916. In April, 1917, he was shell-shocked and sent back to England. He was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital and met another poet, Siegfried Sassoon. They became friends. Sassoon helped Owen to find his voice and write more. He wrote Anthem for Doomed Youth; that title and the shell shock tell that the world was no longer Rupert Brooke’s world. Owen was sent back to France, August, 1918, was awarded a Military Cross, and killed in action a week before the Armistice, 1918.

Owen experienced trench warfare. He and one other were the only commissioned officers left alive after a battle. He was blown into the air by bombing and had to fit himself into a hole too small for him in a snow covered trench. A similar hole across from him was occupied by one of his men who was dead. He walked through flooded trenches and a river. Most of his men had to leave their boots and clothing behind when marching for miles. Dulce et Decorum Est, a poem of 1917, reports on the marching and a gas attack. It is a powerful poem. I cannot quote all of its anxious, terrifying, exact descriptions. I first read it in school. It is grotesque, and it is real.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! –An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmet just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime,--

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

….

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

….

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Note: The Latin is a quote from Horace: “It is sweet and appropriate to die for one’s country.”

Source: Poems (Viking Press, 1921)

Love Letters to Ukraine meets Sassoon’s statement, “a true poet must be truthful.” Kalpna tells it like it is for her emotions, her true caring for the Ukrainians killed with such brutality, and the love she shares with the Ukrainian earth.  She tries to keep her hope: “If there is another day, another life/I promise to rise like a Phoenix/from the ashes of my being/in your skies, blue and yellow.” p  43