A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of this child’s home
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the Russian Empire’s ambitions
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of Chernobyl
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the tanks that rolled over civilians
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the Holocaust memorial in Kiev
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the museums in Prague
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the Opera House in Berlin
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the Russian Tea Room
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the market in Warsaw
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the soul of Moscow
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left of the World
Ground under the boot heel of Fascism
A Handful of Gravel is all that is left on the Grave of Democracy
If Putin, Xi and Trump get their way
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Today I wept inconsolably for a child I do not know. A Ukrainian girl who clutched three small pebbles she saved from the bombed remnant of her home before fleeing for her life as Russian tanks crushed her neighborhood but not her spirit.
Those pebbles and a ragged teddy bear her only keepsake as she faces an uncertain future as a refugee from Putin's war crimes.
I wept for her and for her mother who had no words to explain what had happened to their lives, and even less rational for what madmen are allowed to do in this world.
I may be just one ordinary person, one voice, one lone writer but words are bigger than one; this poem 'A Handful of Gravel’ is response to the naked aggression of Neo-Fascists on the move in Europe and in the US political body.
Authoritarianism has prospered under the avarice of Capitalism; perhaps my simple words can be grit in the war machine - throw in enough and bring the behemoth to its knees.