Nocturne 20 / Away to Nowhere

by Shellie Harwood

                                    I

A truck carries the piano, burnished,

to the borderline between Ukraine and Poland.

A rush of gentle hands lift it to ground,

one stone’s skip from the battered tracks.

A slight man lowers himself to the bench,

rests fingers on ivory.

Shepherd of exiles,

he will play them through.

Ukrainian mothers step from trains, as weary dancers,

lift arms together, pour their children over the border

like liquid gold. The pianist plays on as light drops,

cut-gloved, bare-fingered,

he caresses Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20,

in C sharp minor,

ushers the refugees, like a waterfall,

into Poland, another land’s clay on their shoes.

Plays on, tempo marking: “Lento con gran espressione”,

meaning “very slow, and with many expressions”.

And so, at tempo, they have come, slowly,

with many faces, nothing more to lose.

                                    II

Olesia’s mother lives in a whisper,

her hands tied behind her back

as she waits at a small café, waits

blindfolded, for Odessa to fall.

She sips strong coffee through a paper straw,

with birds inside her chest. Big wings beat

hard against her brittle bones.

She mouths a letter to Olesia while she waits

for her city to crumble, a letter about the

birds inside, about the grief of all mothers.

She is soaked in the sorrow of Odessa.

A puddle fills, refills beneath her chair.

She prays for skies to close.

Olesia writes to her mother, Come to me.

Come away from Odessa. Olesia’s mother will not.

Will not float across oceans on her own despair.

She has an occupation. She is the record keeper now,

for lost Odessa. She sips, her blind eye turned, and counts

the fleeing feet that shuffle by the sad café,

feet on their way away to nowhere.