Recently I searched work by Ukranian authors at the Poetry International website -- hoping to find poems with mentions of mathematics -- but I did not. Eventually, though, praise of a poem by UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage led me to "Resistance" (published here in The Guardian) with uses a prime number (11) of stanzas, each with a prime number (3) of lines, to speak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its effects. Here are the opening stanzas:
Resistance by Simon Armitage
It’s war again: a family
carries its family out of a pranged house
under a burning thatch.
The next scene smacks
of archive newsreel: platforms and trains
(never again, never again),
toddlers passed
over heads and shoulders, lifetimes stowed
in luggage racks.
It’s war again: unmistakable smoke
on the near horizon mistaken
for thick fog. Fingers crossed. . . .
for the rest of Resistance, follow this link.
Ukrainian-born Ilya Kaminsky is a very fine poet now living in the US. Here is a link to one of his poems that describes too many of us, "We Lived Happily During the War."
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