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.