Demolishment of Our Innocence

About this poem

On July 19, 2022, I composed and posted online a poem entitled “Vova, A Ukrainian Refugee Child Poet,” in which I referred to 13-year old Vova Ovcharenko, now residing in New York under the auspices of refugee status, along with other family members, as “a child of freedom” being sheltered by New York’s Lady Liberty. This three-stanza, five-line, 5-7-5-7-7 metered extended tanka poem, entitled “Demolishment of Our Innocence,” takes a line from Vova’s untitled composition (which employs a vocabulary of raging warfare suggestive of rampant destruction by violence) as a means of amplifying the devastating horror of bloody warfare on the psyche of children, like 13-year old Vova Ovcharenko, robbing them of their childhood innocence without mercy and reminding us, oh so bluntly, that we, as presumptuous moral Homo Sapiens, as Vova suggests implicitly, all fall prey to The Seven Deadly Sins of Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth. I have taken the liberty of providing Vova Ovcharenko’s untitled composition, appended to my own composition, with the title of “Forbearance” since it seems to capture the courageous restraint shown by a 13-year old Ukrainian refugee, a survivor of childhood trauma occasioned by warfare exposure. May Lady Liberty truly ennoble him as a child of freedom. more »