I saw Georgii Senchenko’s large painting at a museum exhibit of Ukrainian artists, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. I stared at it for half an hour. Senchenko painted it in 1988 during glasnost, when artists and writers played a key part in the protest movement for an open society, leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union. His eerie landscape, the beekeepers’ hooded shapes and empty faces, haunted me into writing my poem.

Maxine Susman, from central New Jersey, has published seven poetry collections, with work in journals such as Paterson Literary Review, Fourth River, Earth’s Daughters, Crab Orchard Review, Slant, and Canary. She is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and teaches poetry at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Rutgers University.