WINNER
SMALL ORANGE EMERGING WOMAN POET HONOR 2022

The Girl and the Unicorn Pajamas

Last week a talk on poetry and war, the poetry

of war, and talk of war, and this week, war,

a new war and still in other places other wars.

In the news, a photograph of medics

in Mariupol, Ukraine, who couldn’t save

the girl they were working on and crying

over. One spoke in fury to the cameraman.

Show this to Putin, this child’s eyes, these

doctors’ tears. The photo hardly shows

what the article describes, pajamas

adorned with unicorns, her small uniform

for the sleep she never got, the sleep

she never woke from, decorated as with medals

but with unicorns and bloodstains

on those prancing creatures, symbols of

love’s power, the powder of their horns

an antidote for poison and a healer

of the sick. Not now, not here.

A one-horned beast was said to stop

the ruthless Genghis Khan en route

to conquer India; he read its three deep bows

as a message from his father, a warning

to turn back or face some unknown danger.

In the folklore of Ukraine, the unicorn

eschewed the ark and swam for forty days

and forty nights. The indrik, unicorn

of Russian lore, the father of all beasts,

so powerful its skips could shake the earth,

but gentle, became a mascot for the tsar

who rampaged Russia; Ivan the Terrible

had one imprinted on his seal. The printed

unicorns on the girl’s pajamas had no powers,

not healing, not antidote, not forewarning;

no force of love could save the girl,

no more than could pajamas covered

with fire engines, camouflage, or bears.

The speaker in the talk on poetry and war

asked what poetry might save.

The best the unicorns could do

was capture our imaginations

and beg us hold in them the girl

herself and all she might have been;

forget the unicorns on her pajamas.

Rebekah Wolman lives in San Francisco, on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people. Her poems have appeared in Essential Love, an anthology of poems about parents and children, and in The New Verse News, Limp Wrist, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Orotone, and Cultural Daily, where she is a 2021 winner of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. She tweets intermittently @rebekah_wolman.