Ukraine - Will It Be A Lost Paradise? Poem by Bernedita Rosinha Pinto

What does it benefit one nation to fight another nation,
what are their grudges and what are their intentions?
How can they impose terror and horror on each other
and fight their own neighbor with such hate and anger?
Where they use gunfire and explosives against each other
without thinking or considering the hurt and brunt of damage?
Where each adversary with its own ego and zealous attitude
uses arms and ammunition, bombs and explosions
to unleash the terror and feel unworthily victorious?

Can a nation ever get back to its own form and formula
when war rattles it and havocs it with the battering?
The loss of lives, the bombed apartments,
the empty streets filled with debris everywhere;
the neighborhoods that look so sullen and isolated
as devastation escalates sufferings and struggles,
while people feel so distressed and dejected.

When will vivacity ever ring the door bell to tell -
'I am home' - when the home itself has been destroyed
by bombs and tanks, by explosions and terror.
How will their minds and eyes refrain from those memories
that these were the same streets where they played
as children while their grandparents kept watch
and today there are no friends, there are no people
to talk or to tell who has survived, who has died
as everyone has to run to save themselves from death.

While those who as refugees fled to other countries
will have no thought to remember what they left back
but they knew from the bottom of their hearts
that as they ran they had lost their paradise of love
which they will forever miss and never be able to ever
join back the family tree as some have died and perished,
some stayed back and fought yet they also succumbed
and some who fled survived only to feel traumatized
remembering that this war was so harsh and so hostile,
so rough and so tough, so unexpected and so futile
with no mercy or pity, with no compassion or sympathy.