How, on earth,
Does the conscientiousness in Ukraine
Abide the contemptuous obduracy
Of the man in the street
In Moscow?

How, pray tell,
Do the afflicted in Ukraine
Not stand upright
And scream scorn in the street,
At the blatancy of the falsity
And the moral nihilism
Of Trump's America?

Wherein the strength
To maintain the fight,
In the face of the brutality
And colossal might
Of the Russian bear?

How, In God's name,
Does the Russian Orthodox Church
Claim a face of morality
In supporting Putin's
Perpetual
War of Atrocity?


The Cloak of Words

They bless the guns with incense smoke,
priests in gilded robes anointing shrapnel—
Christ bent into a weapon,
Orthodoxy kneeling at the altar of empire.

And in the Kremlin’s shadow,
Putin wraps himself in scripture,
his war against brothers renamed “holy,”
his cruelty baptized as duty.

Across the ocean,
Pax Americana yawns.
Indifference packaged in streaming boxes,
thumbs scrolling past the corpses
to fret about mortgage rates and
what Netflix will release next Friday.

Trump, the conjurer,
dances his two-faced waltz with the tyrant—
whispering peace,
bartering away the dead,
dreaming of a medal on his chest
while Ukraine burns for his vanity.

And the world?
Geographically removed,
morally adrift.
They call it “tragedy,”
a soft word,
a safe word,
that hides the perpetrators
and lulls the conscience to sleep.

But tragedy is not the right name.
This is atrocity.
This is brutality.
This is the silence of those
who should have spoken,
and the complicity of those
who chose not to care.

So rise, you binge-fed, comfort-bound,
Let fury shake the sleeping ground.
Let scorn ignite your passive breath,
And shame become your sword of death.

SLAVA UKRAINI

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
17 September 2025

The order wanes, its spine grown thin,
Where empires once held sway within.
A rising tide, a rival’s claim—
The stage resets, the rules inflame.

China builds with silent might,
While Washington prepares to fight.
Trade once free now wears a chain,
Security the new domain.

Trump ascends with Vance in tow,
In volatile, unscripted show.
Allies shift, the balance reels,
Old accords replaced by deals.

No map expands, no flags unfurl,
Yet power pulses through the world.
Protectionist, the new refrain—
A fiscal shield, a sovereign gain.

Tomorrow’s light may burn too bright,
With eyeballs locked in brink-of-fight.
The past returns, not dressed the same,
But history plays a ruthless game.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ

In the hush between raindrops and stone, the hills lean inward, as if listening for a voice that never returned.

Low clouds drag their grief across the shoulders of the land, a soft lament in vapor, layered like old letters, unsent.

The trees don't speak— but their silence is fluent, a language of absence etched in shadow and bark.

The sorrow here doesn't weep, it settles in the terrain like ash from a fire no one recalls lighting.

A tragedy, perhaps, of the forgotten— the slow erosion of faces from stone, the fading of footsteps into deep green moss.

And still, the wind carries a lament— a breath, a whisper, a suggestion that the past is not past, it merely sleeps beneath the skeins of brooding, hung cloud.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ