Thanks for your comments. Yes, I did this on my own. I’m part of an informal group of friends who support 2 Ukrainian families in Sonoma County, but my trip to Ukraine for the Bread is Life project was on my own. Thank goodness for Google Translate! Most young people and workers in hotels, restaurants, train stations, etc., speak some English but the further you get from the cities, the more you need to rely on Google Translate. I’ve driven in Italy, so Ukraine was a piece of cake!
I wish my response to the people of Ukraine could be more like yours, but words are all I have to offer. This poem is from my book, Movement. —Suzanne Maxson, Sebastopol
This is fascinating and heartbreaking . Thank you for your service to the people of Ukraine. Are you doing this on your own? I know you mentioned Sebastopol Friends but are you part of another group? How did you deal with the language barriers? You are also very brave, in my opinion, to drive in Europe!
Thanks for your comments. Yes, I did this on my own. I’m part of an informal group of friends who support 2 Ukrainian families in Sonoma County, but my trip to Ukraine for the Bread is Life project was on my own. Thank goodness for Google Translate! Most young people and workers in hotels, restaurants, train stations, etc., speak some English but the further you get from the cities, the more you need to rely on Google Translate. I’ve driven in Italy, so Ukraine was a piece of cake!
I wish my response to the people of Ukraine could be more like yours, but words are all I have to offer. This poem is from my book, Movement. —Suzanne Maxson, Sebastopol
THE CONQUEST OF BREAD
In Ukraine the president’s wife
mourns that her little son who once
loved to dance and play the piano
now wants only to be a soldier.
A farmer in Ukraine speaks
of a project to feed the people
in wartime, providing free grain
to the granaries who freely
will grind it for the bakers
to freely bake the bread, thus
providing that sustenance
to the people, who in Ukraine
sometimes at home speak Russian.
The Russian Pyotr Kropotkin dreamed
of providing to all people good health
and bread and happiness, proclaiming
to the twentieth century and to this one
the dangers in devotion to capital
and in resignation to the cruelties
of greed. He dreamed
that pianists might sometimes work
with a collective of carpenters, each
engaged in the skills and the pleasures
of their work, thereby
fulfilling each in a meaningful life
and providing the people with music.
In Ukraine the people did sing
in the early days of this war
in basement shelters, and even
between bombings brought pianos
into the public squares where also
elderly women learned to shoot.
Kropotkin observed in the lives
of animals that their survival
is not bound in competition
but in mutual aid, in cooperation
and even in mutual pleasure, as birds
take flight together in the joy of it.
Neither Adam Smith nor Darwin
took sufficient notice of generosity
and joy. Kropotkin also, in his
observations, understood empathy
as a quality neither universally
nor uniquely human.
In everything exists the possibility
for generosity. Kropotkin’s dream
endures in the farmer’s project
offering bread.
As for survival, witness also
the intelligence of the slime mold
in whom singular and plural
are permeable states:
in challenging conditions
the membranes of those single cells
will fuse in a protoplasmic collectivity
of response, rising
to that challenge in movement
of primordial elegance. The wisdom
of slime molds does not now preoccupy
the citizens of Ukraine
but Kropotkin might recognize in it
The Conquest of Bread, his manifesto
for that utopian dream of the collective
as we might see
from the heights of time like birds
all human history as movement
in a protoplasmic migratory waltz.
The soldier dreams of dancing.
The farmer dreams of bees.
In her dream an old woman
lifts a rifle and wishes to awaken
in her bed. The carpenters sing.
The citizens in our dreams
are birds, soaring above borders
in liberation from the cage of nations
where presidents dream their dreams.
This is fascinating and heartbreaking . Thank you for your service to the people of Ukraine. Are you doing this on your own? I know you mentioned Sebastopol Friends but are you part of another group? How did you deal with the language barriers? You are also very brave, in my opinion, to drive in Europe!