Three Years Later
When it began, we feared the end
would come too quick, like summer rain, but war
leaves roots and heliotropes towards flame, a sunflower
weighed by grip and reaching. A Baba stuffed sunflower
seeds into an invading soldier’s pockets, you’ll end
up in our soil, she told him, but at least your war
will grow you, turn you into something beautiful. War
is water that drowns as it quenches. The sunflowers,
like open wounds or mouths, demand it doesn’t end
like this. War doesn’t end in sunflowers, it begins—
*
Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist of the Miller Williams Prize. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, with nonfiction in Brevity, Shenandoah, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.
Love this narrative Julia. The sunflowers growing beyond the ravages of war. horrible and beautiful. (Carla Schwartz)
I keep returning to the last lines. This poem is so powerful & haunting.