4 poems by Finn Harvor

BOY MEETS GIRL AFTER BATTLE 1

Pretty in the morning
Disfigured by afternoon,
The girl lies under rubble
Where a soldier spots her,
Not realizing that three hours earlier
Everything else being equal,
He would have felt differently
And their meeting,
Crump-thuddy
And shot-staccatoed,
Would had led to something more,
A sequel.





BOY MEETS GIRL AFTER BATTLE 2

The shrapnel tore a gouge
From her left eye to her chin.
The artillery barrage
And its concussive blasts
Made the roof of her house fall in.

Then the collapsing wall
Avalanched blocks,
Cracking her skull
And breaking some ribs
And leaving her in shock.

*

Three hours later,
Still alive,
A platoon found her there.
One solider poked her with his foot
The next pretended to shoot
The third gave the girl water
And the fourth 
Looked for something to loot.






BOY MEETS GIRL AFTER BATTLE 3

The soldier kissed her lips
Still glossed
Under the finest
Dust.





BOY MEETS GIRL AFTER BATTLE, THE UKRAINIAN FRONTIER,  (FEBRUARY 24th, 2022)

In the still cold grey
the infantryman Plenkov 
boards an APC
that is still and cold and grey.
The staff sargeant Blatsky,
his eyes bleary 
and thick with
some fog of torment,
barks in a hungover growl,
“We’re going to Kyiv, boys.
There’re Nazis there,
and we’re going to clean house.”
“But, Sarge,” the corpsman Vrinsky plaintively asks,
“You said we were just training. Last night in the mess, you said —”
“Zip it,” Blatsky says, this time his growl with fuel,
“I do what the Captain says. You do what I say.”

The men clamber into the harsh confines 
of the APC (coffin. cabin),
and Plenkov’s buddy Vinshky nudges him.
“Look,” Vinshky grins, thumbing the screen
of his smartphone, fingering, lovingly,
the Tinder app.
“These Uke girls are HOT, pal,
we’re doing these people a favour,
and, in a week or so 
when the fighting’s over,
we’ll be doing occupation duty,
in night clubs —.
This is gonna be great …
I kid you not.”

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Award-winning artist, writer, musician, filmmaker. Finn Harvor’s articles have appeared in many journals, including the Brooklyn Rail and Canadian Notes and Queries. He has presented at academic conferences in Oxford, Bath, Liverpool, Berlin, Seoul, Osaka, and elsewhere. His work has been selected by festivals in Korea, Ireland, the U.K., the US, China (Hong Kong), Kazakhstan, Australia, Greece, Pakistan, Serbia, Portugal, and India. Harvor is particularly interested in the following themes: nature and the anthropocene, addiction, and family dynamics (his late brother’s story is related to these themes), as well as technology and contemporary war. Harvor usually make videopoems that he terms authorial movies; these are movies in which one person creates (authors) all elements of the movie.

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