a woman in a winter hat
lifts the fallboard
dusts the grit off the keys
and begins to play Chopin
on the white grand piano
a window shattered
a wall torn and strewn
on the floor around
the woman in her winter
jacket playing Chopin
on the dirty piano
to think this woman survived
the shock to think she
had rushed home from
the local market after
hearing her 16-year-old
daughter survived the missile
dropped onto their street
on Saturday [March 5]
onto their home in Bila Tserkva
Kyiv Oblast central Ukraine
the woman in her winter hat
lifts the fallboard dusts the grit
off the keys and begins to play
fast and light her apartment half
in ruins doors and glass strewn
across the floor and even the remains
of a fire that raged from her
23-year-old son’s room
as she plays Chopin’s etude
op. 25 no. 1 consisting entirely
of rapid arpeggios and harmonic
modulations almost a study but
not quite a poem the woman
in her knit hat her left hand
playing the supportive bass line
a stuffed cow in the corner
the accompaniment built
of broken chords or polyrhythms
from time to time and melody quick
like laughter dusting the grit
off the keys after a fire and a bomb
surround the inner voices of both hands
figures consisting of repeated figures
of arpeggiated chords in A-flat major
the debris strewn on the floor
to play the sextuples fast enough
and to be able to move the hand
across intervals as large
as a 13th in the middle—
Video link to this incident: Ukrainian Mum Plays Piano in Home Ruined by Bomb || Dogtooth Media
Josette Akresh-Gonzales is the author of “Apocalypse on the Linoleum” (Lily Poetry Review Press). Her work has been published in The Southern Review, The Indianapolis Review, JAMA, The Pinch, The Journal, Breakwater, PANK, and many other journals, as well as the anthology Choice Words (Haymarket). She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Website: josettepoet.com. Note: This poem is part of a book-length project in which each section is titled with the same name as the BBC’s “Planet Earth” episode; “a white grand piano” is in the “winter” piece of the Seasonal Forests section.
