Kuzka’s mother

For a decade we fought off the wild polar bears,
And laboured by day in forty-knot winds.
For Papa we worked on the project of projects:
Three thousand Little Boys for the thin-skins.

Our acres of tents scattered over the tundra,
Insulated with vodka, we sang peasant songs;
Wondered whose sky was this we sat under,
And would this war start to thaw before long.

We planted a mushroom the size of a concept:
Seven times taller than Mount Everest.
Over Nova Zembla, for a minute or less,
There shone a second sun. To the southwest,

The sound of breaking glass: in Norway and Finland,
Children tugged at each other’s sleeves in fear,
While, some thousand kilometres east, we
Introduced Kuzka’s Mother to the mesosphere.

Appears in:
Poetic Republic Prize Anthology: Poems to Talk About: Warming Bees [2014]
Rhymes for all times [2015]

Notes:
Wikipedia entry for “Kuzka’s mother“.