It Was Never The Ukraine
I
The first I’d heard of it was a report
of a missionary we’d funded in 1993
to the Ukraine, one of those
lands between Europe and Russia—
are they still Soviet?
We referred to it as Russia but not quite, Russia
sort of, like ghosts invaded a thicker
land. Pale people, as in the photographs,
like us but not, decades behind, unibrows
and windbreakers and woven attachments
on their blouses—is there a cow that won’t
milk at all? kind of place. We lent a missionary
to the region, the subregion, that
portion, a satellite of some swelling realer place.
II
I saw the missionary on a newspaper in 2005.
Only it was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
taped to a bulletin board with a note:
“Is our missionary a terrorist?”
as a joke, perhaps. The missionary laughed.
He looked like a photograph of Ahmadinejad.
III
I never forgot the missionary’s face resembling
Iran’s president, and now cannot unsee the face
of Ukraine’s president. We sent no man
from the America, he did not look like
the chief executive of the Iran.
But why, after having gone and returned,
did he never tell us not to say the Ukraine?
And I know the heart and the face of the man who
taped the clipping, and can see him shrug
at Putin’s prerogative, at what we call what don’t care to see being.
It was never right, but it was the right. The hatred. The ignorance.
I am tired of every the that there is.
CALEB COY 