Exciting news!
We’re thrilled to share that our Deputy Editor in Chief, Matt Mooney, has had two of his poems published in the prestigious international literary magazine, ‘UKRAINE: A World Anthology of Poems on War.’ We extend our warmest congratulations to Matt on this remarkable achievement and commend him for his brilliant poetry. Best wishes pour in from all the editors and readers of The Galway Review.
Matt Mooney, a Galway native, lives in Listowel.
He has six poetry collections. Won The Pádraig Liath Ó Conchubhair Award.
Deputy Editor of The Galway Review. Published in The Blue Nib, Feasta, Vox Galvia, The Stony Thursday Book, The Galway Review, The Mill Valley Literary Review and in many anthologies.
Only a Hercules
The low leaden skies have buried the sun,
a steel-gray day dying in an orange glow.
Away the war roars of Russia and Ukraine
rise from the throat of battered Bakhmut,
becoming the murky waters of my waking,
thinking daily of life down in the trenches.
Zelensky, walks tall for a Napoleonic man,
a short-bearded firebrand in khaki T-shirts,
the undimmed light of freedom in his eyes.
Putin, seen striding from gold-walled halls,
a Soviet mentally marching the goose-step,
clean-shaven, shirt and tie, expressionless.
For peace we need to summon a Hercules,
the human giant in Kiev has done his best,
to lift the skies again, to let the sunlight in
yonder where sunflowers hang their heads.
Dnipro
There is a hole in the heart of Dnipro,
a deadly deep war wound wide open,
a block of apartments that’s squashed
in an embankment on the river Dniper.
Through it I imagine a menacing face,
the warlord who planned the invasion,
staring with daring cold eyes at us all,
proud of the Kremlin’s cruise missiles.
In the past their privacy was precious,
in freedom they could live to the full
but today all this seems worlds away,
critically injured, counting their dead.
Their apocalypse in glorious Ukraine,
tragic and grotesque for them to view,
flowers seen in what’s left of a kitchen,
so perilously perched in an act of love.
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