“We are one people,” said the self-styled tsar
as the missile landed at the train station
with a message from the royal household on its side
“For the children” 

“We are brothers,” echoed the misbegotten conscript
as he put a bullet in the brain of the man
with potatoes in his hands to feed his family
riding his bicycle home

“We are one,” they said,
as Khan’s descendants dropped their payload
so their comrades could spirit away our housewares to sell
at bazaars, where scarlet-soaked roubles stuffed the cash boxes

But we were never one, and you’ve known it all along
You knew it at Poltava in 1709
You knew it when you denied our language existed in 1863
You knew it when you banned it altogether at Ems in 1876

You knew it when you invaded Kyiv in 1918
You knew it when you starved us to death in 1932-33
You knew it when you conquered our western lands in 1939-41
You knew it when you invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014

And you know it well today
as you force yourself on us anew
the only way you know how, evil, rapacious, genocidal
as your clownish clerics stand in the pulpit and preach our “liquidation”

Our legacy was never yours
you children of the Golden Horde and Byzantium
you were never the true scions of Riuryk, of Holy Rus’,
though your false witness bleated otherwise through the ages

And neither was our lady Kyiv ever yours
she, who already shone, while your centre
was nothing but a gnarled tree root on a forest path
where the Butcher of Bucha would one day sup at long tables

No matter how often you violated her
you were never her conjoint
even if her wretched Soviet Motherland Monument
was forced to fix her gaze subserviently in your direction

There was a time when some thought fraternally of you
but now the burned-out shells of buildings
where the innocents breathed their last
have cast the boundary between us in stone

Your “Great Russian” brotherhood
will forever be anathema among those you called “Little Russians”
Our free people will trample your tricolour rag, over and over
in the meadows where the bent red viburnum rises once again