In a Station of the Kyiv Metro

July 18, 2024

by John Barton

A ghost sitting on the crowded platform

Beside train cars bedded down with children

You post your petal face on Instagram

Before signal grows dim, phone not plugged in

 

Back against concrete, cross-legged on tile

Tacky with bottled water and canned goods

Neighbours dividing them scarcely less pale

Than you, trees on streets above yet to bud

 

And may not flower against drifting plumes

Missiles fired in waves from Russia stencil

Across your emptied tower block, living room

Gaping through walls partway sloughed, guts reduced

 

To landfill, son’s face saved to Pinterest

Petal among petals smudged by what lasts.

 

John Barton published his tenth chapbook, Stopwatch, in 2024. His thirteenth book of poetry, Compulsory Figures, is forthcoming. He lives in Victoria.


Questions and Answers

Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?

I became interested in writing in the mid-1970s when I first encountered Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing in a Grade 11 English class at William Aberhart Senior High School in Calgary, Alberta. Our assignment was to read and write a paper about a Can lit novel of our own choice, and I found the PaperJacks paperback edition of Surfacing in a rotating bookrack in the drugstore at the Brentwood Village Mall. Atwood had published this novel only a couple of years before. Something in its voice and worldview—in particular, how it linked a sense of self to the land—spoke to me and it led me to her books of poems, and to the books of other poets. I wanted to count myself in their number. Atwood’s Governor General’s Award-winning book of poems, The Circle Game, which she had published in her mid-twenties—at the time that I encountered her work she was considered a “young writer”—became and continues to be a touchstone book for me. Who and what inspires each of us as is as individual as a fingerprint. To extrapolate from my own experience, I encourage beginning poets to find a poet whose work deeply resonates with their own and read their work compulsively. Try on their strategies and techniques to see how they look in the mirror we hold up to ourselves. Let their accomplishments lead to the poems of other like-hearted poets. Decide for yourself what works in what they do and what doesn’t. Poetry is a set of overlapping trails blazed through a universe of feelings and ideas. See where those trails lead while blazing a trail of your own. Others will follow.

What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?

The idea for this poem came to me during the first week after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Only the weekend before, the Freedom Convoy had been ended in Ottawa and, suddenly, before there was time to take a breath, another event of far more dire import was putting our own problems as a country into more rational perspective. I remember listening to a radio interview with a Kyiv resident who spoke by cellphone from a subway station. She’d gone there to shelter during one of the first Russian bombardments of the city. The woman described the conditions underground that she and other residents had found themselves to be sharing and how they were relying on continued connectivity to feel secure in themselves despite the unexpected precarity of their physical circumstances. One day, she had been pursuing her life as an ordinary citizen, perhaps even disbelieving—or wanting to disbelieve—that the long-threatened invasion would ever transpire, and on the next, she found herself contending with actual threats to her own mortality—and the mortality of others, especially of children, who had no role in the causes of this war. What do we bring with us to survive (phone charges and tins of soup?) and how do we find ways to continue to leave traces of ourselves on the world (Instagram and Pinterest?)?

 

What poetic techniques did you use in this poem, and how did your writing process unfold?

“In a Station of the Kyiv Metro” is a sonnet, with ten-syllable lines and a very slant take on the Shakespearean rhyme scheme; I was less concerned with making each line perfectly iambic than allowing the restrictions imposed by the syllable count and the rhymes to push me deeper into the subject material. Turns in the poem’s argument fall after the eighth and twelfth lines, modulating the flow of ideas and feelings. As the form  helped me figure out what I wanted to say, I found myself thinking about the cherry blossoms coming out on street after street around me in Victoria. I started to imagine them being laid flat by bombs. The lines of that great poem of the underground, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”—“The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.”—shadowed my thoughts.

Pound led me to some of the imagery and mood that I needed for my own poem. The people sheltering in my poem feel and fear themselves to be ghosts; the ways in which they post their own images online are ghostly. Also, by alluding to Pound, I am attempting another kind of  virtual connection to the permanence that literature provides, as my way of providing a sense of continuity in a situation that is imbued with the potential for annihilation. This moment I describe is but one in many that came before and will come after in the lives of those seeking sanctuary, moments going by as fast as the efficient commuter train they had ridden only days before.

This poem “In a Station of the Kyiv Metro” originally appeared in Canadian Literature 256 (2024): 128.

Please note that works on the Canadian Literature website may not be the final versions as they appear in the journal, as additional editing may take place between the web and print versions. If you are quoting reviews, articles, and/or poems from the Canadian Literature website, please indicate the date of access.