Petals: Poems of a War in Ukraine: The Zoya Septet, #6

By Murray Pura

This is the story of a war.

But it is also a story of human love and beauty and faith that the sun will rise again over a nation torn by terrible conflict.If a novel is like live streaming video, then poetry is a gallery of HD images taken with your iPhone or Nikon DSLR, each picture sharp and crystalline and rich with color and meaning, etched in your mind forever thanks to its precision and brilliance.

This is a small book of such high definition images, vivid snaps of one man's journey through the recent military conflict in Ukraine. People's faces are here, fields of flowers are here, impossibly blue skies and sharp suns, roads and streets and windows that remain perfectly intact even though the rest of the house has been blown to pieces. Love is here, and peace sits in the same room as pain, while hope has more strength than killing or death. The man's words are beautiful and true and, as real as the war he fights is, dawn and tomorrow are more real.

Parts of it will tell your story. Parts of it will become your story. Parts of it will take you on a journey you never expected to take. That is the power of poetry in motion.

Begin at this man's beginning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MillerWords, LLC
• Release date: Nov 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386689171

Murray Pura

I'm born Canadian, live in the blue Canadian Rockies, sound Canadian when I talk (sort of) ... but I'm really an international guy who has traveled the world by train and boat and plane and thumb ... and I've lived in Scotland, the Middle East, Italy, Ireland, California and, most recently, New Mexico. I write in every fiction genre imaginable because I'm brimming over with stories and I want to get them out there to share with others ... romance, Amish, western, fantasy, action-adventure, historical, suspense ... I write non-fiction too, normally history, biography and spirituality. I've won awards for my novels ZO and THE WHITE BIRDS OF MORNING and have celebrated penning bestselling releases like THE WINGS OF MORNING, THE ROSE OF LANCASTER COUNTY, A ROAD CALLED LOVE and ASHTON PARK. My latest publications include BEAUTIFUL SKIN (spring 2017), ALL MY BEAUTIFUL TOMORROWS (summer 2017), GETTYSBURG (Christmas 2018), RIDE THE SKY (spring 2019), A SUN DRENCHED ELSEWHERE (fall 2019), GRACE RIDER (fall 2019) and ABIGAIL’S CHRISTMAS MIRACLE (Christmas 2019). My novels ZO, RIDE THE SKY and ABIGAIL’s CHRISTMAS MIRACLE are available as audiobooks as well. Please browse my extensive list of titles, pick out a few, write a review and drop me a line. Thanks and cheers!

Book preview

Introduction

My name is Roman Klimenko. I was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada. We moved to America when I was 11. My father was a school principal. I had only a very vague idea that I was of Ukrainian blood. My mother’s side was German and I had even less a sense of that. My parents wanted us to think of ourselves as Americans. But when father’s brothers and sisters visited us, my uncles and aunts, there was no escaping my Ukrainian bloodline – they spoke in Ukrainian, bickered in Ukrainian, and demanded Ukrainian food like pyrohy and holopchi.

Aunt Helen would bring me intricately decorated eggs at Easter. Whenever I visited her home it was like visiting a foreign country – icons with dark eyes brooded on the walls, pickles and dill floated like pike among lake weed in huge glass jars, pictures of the Pope blessing a crowd and of Jesus opening his chest to a Sacred Heart mingled with a photograph of her father, my grandfather and namesake, lying in his coffin, hands clasped on his chest. The whole house held a heavy scent of a musk or incense that was sweet and bitter at the same time. When I went to her church the same smell came in white clouds from a censer the priest shook at us. A male choir groaned in Ukrainian like a thunderstorm. We knelt, we crossed ourselves, we stood, we knelt again. All of this was new to me. My family did not attend church and certainly not a church with large onion-shaped domes topped by crosses. Nor did the walls of our house have icons or pictures of Popes or crucifixes of writhing Christs on rigid crosses.

In time, I grew interested enough in the Ukrainian side of my family to travel to Lviv for a year and do genealogical research. I knew our people had come from this region.