Sometimes war is a heavily armed soldier
and a woman in a winter coat standing six feet apart.
The soldier has an AK-74 and the woman has her voice.
And a raging imagination.
She asks questions he can’t answer,
He gives answers that are not his.
On one thing they both agree,
It would be better if he was not there.
Right now he is a foreign nation
and she is the anger of her native land.
She tells him to fill his pockets with sunflowers seeds.
It is not hard to imagine him wondering why.
“So they will grow,” she shouts, “on Ukrainian soil when you die.”
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Russian combat soldiers now carry AK-74, replacing the former AK-47. The ‘A’ stands for ‘assault.’
The ‘K’ is the initial of Mikhail Kalashnikov a lieutenant general in the Soviet army and weapons
inventor who built the first one in 1947.Kalashnikov also wrote poetry all of his life. He died in 2013
at the age of 94. Sunflowers are the national flower of Ukraine.