War tramples Kyiv culture. The art museum’s windows are blown out. The concert hall is shrouded in dust. The statue of Taras Shevchenko, lauded poet, is pitted and pocked by bullets. Dead silence. These images beg my imagination for color, for sound, this pen.
ringing the base of the bell tower sprouts of green grass
Drifting Sands Haibun #21 (May 2023) and Tan-ku For Ukraine: A World Haiku and Tanka Anthology, ed. Dimitar Anakiev. Sofia, Bulgaria: gabriell-e-lit Publishing House, 2024.
Edited by Christopher Bogart Paperback, 384 pages Published April 6, 2025 ISBN – 979-8315258650 Available on Amazon
Editor’s Introduction
This poetic anthology is designed to be a platform for poets from across the fifty states as well as the US Virgin Islands, to speak out against; and, in resistance to, Project 2025, as well as the agenda of Donald J. Trump.
The poems in this anthology are as diverse as the poets who wrote them. Represented in this diverse group are native and naturalized Americans, LGBTQ+, as well as diverse religious, ethnic and regional backgrounds. The poems are in a variety of different styles and formats that includes poetry with video links, haiku burned onto wood then photographed, as well as poetry of various shapes and sizes.
But all the poetry in this book is reactive to a “new America” that began on January 20, 2025 – an America that our Founding Fathers would barely recognize. With the extreme right-wing Project 2025 as a guide, this new America seems more like “the Upside Down,” the malevolent world of horrors depicted in the Netflix’s series, Stranger Things. This America is not the America of inclusivity memorialized in the words of The New Colossus at the base of The Statue of Liberty, “Give me your Tired, your Poor,” but the America of ICE raids, of racist rants, of detention camps, and of white supremacy, where many Americans are considered to be “polluters of the white bloodline” and who come from “shithole countries.” In this new Upside Down world, lies are more and more accepted as truths; the United States Constitution, that every political figure and every American in military uniform, swears to “preserve, protect and defend,” is defied or ignored. This is a world where our friends have become our enemies, and our enemies have now become our friends.
In her February 9, 2025 interview on Meet the Press, Amanda Gorman, the youngest Inaugural poet to serve in that role at the Biden Inauguration, when asked about the importance of poets and of poetry today, said this.
Poetry has consistently been the language of a people. I think it’s the reason why, when there’s protest, you will hear metaphor. You will hear they buried us, but they didn’t know we were seeds. The reason that there’s a poem and not a 36-page essay at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty, when we are trying, as a people, to speak to our best shared common humanity, typically, poetry is the rhetoric that encapsulates that the best. I think there’s something magical about it, that is humble, that is hopeful, but that’s also wounded enough to remind us of the past that we’ve stepped from and the future we want to move to.
If I might add to Amanda Gorman’s statement on the importance of poetry, in the chronicles of the major events in the history of the world, when the story is told, it is told in poetry.
And so I felt that it was time to let American poets have their say, “to speak to the American Conscience,” to remind them what the real purpose of this country has always been. Because to remain silent, is to consent.
