Ethnic Nick

 Friends of the (human) family—

When August and I first got together she encouraged me to examine and appreciate my ethnic roots which are Slovak on my mother’s side and Ukrainian on my dad's side. For both of my parents English was their second language and among themselves they spoke some sort of Slavic tongue none of us five kids could understand. I grew up with Slovak conversation as a kind of soothing background music.

Both sets of grandparents came to America around 1900 and both worked in (separate) coal mines in Ohio and Pennsylvania. My parents met not in some mining town but in the steel-making city of Lorain, OH where a lot of Slovaks migrated after the mines.

There was a shop in Capitola where August lived that sold all sorts of curious objects among which were the flags of various nations and to humor Nick August bought me a Ukrainian flag which I hung outside on my deck next to my bath pavilion. Years of Boulder Creek rain, wind and summer sun gradually deteriorated that flag until it turned into tatters and I threw it away. But about a year or so ago I ordered a fancier version from Amazon which I hung out on nice days and kept inside when it rained.

This flag was more than just the simple blue and gold but also featured the Ukrainian trident and the words Ukraina in Cyrillic characters.

The fate of Ukraine in modern times has been to be sandwiched between two greater powers. Russia on one side and Lithuanians, or Poles, or Germans on the other. Lately the United States has taken an interest in this resource-rich land and managed to violently overthrow its democratically-elected president in 2014, replacing him with a vassal more compliant to the entities who run America. Not entirely innocent, these Ukes, as they call themselves, they treat their Russian-speaking minority somewhat the way Israelis treat Palestinians, as an unfavored underclass, using heavy artillery in this case to murder thousands of Russian-speaking civilians in the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts with the tacit approval of our hypocritical American government.

Today I unfurled my ethnic flag and mourned the sad entangled fates of Ukraine and Russia. But more mourned the sad descent of the country of my birth into a terrible New Dark Age.

Good luck to us all.
Nick

Monsters Have Feelings Too

by Mike Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine

SONNET 116
William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, 
Although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Happy YIDD

Nick Herbert wishes you Happy YIDD

HAPPY YIDD

The Mayans were right
to predict a dark night
that obliterates all you hold dear.
The prophecies say
It could happen today
And I believe what I hear.

This much is certain:
We can't halt that last curtain:
The end of phenomena, Nature undid.
But while we still here
Let's raise a loud cheer
For Ukrainian feast day of YIDD.

The Soviets slaughtered my people
They famined Twelve Million--they did.
But the rest of us here
Can still lift up a beer
For Ukrainian feast day of YIDD.

My folks worked the mines of Ohio
Black Diamond killed grandpa--it did
But we're out of the covers
And kissing our lovers
On Ukrainian feast day of YIDD.

The flag of Ukraine--gold and blue
She represents the wheat and sky.
Life is fleeting, this is true
But YIDD is here, so lift a brew.
What do we celebrate and why?
Yesterday I Didn't Die.