Anna Bowles
Prom Queen Ukraine
Kharkiv region, September 2024
The village school is half-ruined,
but the assembly hall stands.
Five graduates this year:
four suits and a white dress
decked in flowers.
Around the village, dogs and craters
and the business of electric saws.
Seventeen-year old Katia sings Slava Ukraini.
The mothers are taut with pride.
They cup their children between their palms
and release them into the war.
We Are Not in This Field
Ukraine, 2024
We are not in this field. We are humanitarians,
headed to the village with thermal underwear
in boxes stamped Civilian Use Only.
The daylight is fading. Freezing rain.
The soldier says there were ninety in his battalion,
forty are left… But we are not in this field.
My fists are jammed hard into my pockets.
The livestock are gone. The villagers said,
Don’t waste stuff on us, the army need it.
The soldier backs his van up to ours. We might
mislay a box or two, or forget some paperwork.
As humanitarians, we were not in this field.
In a month, the village will be rubble. The Russians
will rape the women in this field. The soldier’s eyes gleam.
As he tells us about his kids, he is not in this field.
“‘We Are Not in This Field’ arose from frustration with the idea that the West can support Ukraine by sending teddy bears and socks to civilians, but helping the soldiers who are those civilians’ only chance of freedom or even survival would be fueling the conflict. ‘Prom Queen Ukraine’ is set in the village of Mospanove, which was on the front line for six months. Along with Freefilmers, a Ukrainian filmakers’ network turned humanitarian group, I’ve sourced funding for and delivered small-scale medical and reconstruction aid for Mospanove a number of times. As of autumn 2024, the villagers had managed to repair many of their houses, but lack funds to restore the public buildings.” —Anna Bowles
Anna Bowles is a freelance editor and pro-Ukrainian activist who divides her time between London and Ukraine. She began writing poetry in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and her work has been published in Magma, Orbis, The Four-Faced Liar, Poetry Salzburg and others, as well as placing in a number of UK competitions. When in Ukraine she travels and volunteers near the front line and in de-occupied territories, blogging her experience and interviews with people she meets at annabowles.substack.com.