#systematic

"The Universe Favors Us Now Ep"

(Poetry project)

11 poems

5/1/25

Tell me that

You’ve never seen a system with a crack

That however improbable

And however small

Someone fell down

And wasn’t welcomed back up.

Because only so many times

Can the nail be hammered

Before the wood begins to warp

And only so long

Can the earthquake go on

Before the ground begins to fail.

System failure, system failure

Throw the dying ones a rope

But cut off their hands before you do

Or this systematic failure could be fixed.

Tell me how you’ve never seen

Someone fall and fall and fall

Down a hole so deep

It swallowed them up

Never to be noticed again.

Letters on a paper

Ruining lives

Laws for people

Who have never been seen.

System failure, system failure

The hammer keeps on hitting

So cut off their hands

And keep shaking their world

As thousands of Ukrainian fighters and civilians remain in Russian custody, one former prisoner of war who endured torture is determined to expose the harsh conditions they face. He was in Geneva to tell his story, where UN experts have also been working to locate those who are missing. Oleksii Anulia has the body build one would expect from a kickboxing champion. It was hard to believe that the tall person standing in the hallways of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, a year and a half ago, was a frail body with protruding ribs, as seen in the picture he held up in his smartphone. The 31-year-old from the Chernihiv region was among the many Ukrainians who joined the military in February 2022 to resist the Russian invasion. He was also among the unlucky ones to be captured by the enemy forces, being a prisoner of war from 9 March 2022 until a swap of 140 Ukrainian POWs on New Year’s Eve of the same year. During his 10 months of captivity, Anulia was starved, beaten and tortured to the point of resulting in 36 hospitalisations since his release, he said. Despite that, Anulia told Geneva Solutions that “he has no time to feel depressed”. “Fighting for the release of those who are still captive keeps me strong,” he said. That’s what brought him to Geneva earlier this month for the United Nations Human Rights Council’s summer session at the invitation of the Oslo-based Human Rights Research League. In front of a room packed mostly with western diplomats, Anulia described in detail his ordeal, how he was captured in Lukashivka, a small town a few kilometres south of Chernihiv city, while his father was burned alive in a local church nearby. He was then driven to a place near Belarus in a truck carrying potatoes, ammunition and Russian corpses, where a Russian soldier who recognised him from his kickboxing days saved him from being raped. He recounted being moved through six different detention centres, including a notorious correctional colony in Donskoy town, in the Russian Tula province, south of Moscow. There, he endured horrid conditions, subsisting on nothing but two spoons of porridge at times, drinking his own urine and toilet water, and being electrocuted.