The war in Ukraine continued its deadly march through the country’s landscape and communities this past week. The stories we published about it ranged from the danger of refugee women and children being victimized by sexual violence and trafficked to the risks and problems of trying to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for war crimes.

In the middle of these stories about war was a surprising topic: poetry. Rachel Hadas makes beautiful poems; she also writes incisively about pain, suffering and war, as befits the classics scholar she is. Hadas, on the faculty at Rutgers University-Newark, has tackled everything for us from COVID-19 to what Greek mythology would say about Donald Trump. This time, I wrote to her and asked if she would be able to reflect on the war in Ukraine; her story, “‘Laugh right in its face’ – a poet reflects on her craft’s defiant role in the middle of a war,” is her response.

Citing the work of Ukrainian poet Yuri Izdryk and Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky, Hadas shows how poetry can be a beautiful resistance, a “heroic defiance” against the stealthy spread of darkness in the world.

When evil surfaces and is no longer invisible, it will prove to be, in Izdryk’s words, “pathetic, a thing of no worth / and we two will laugh, we’ll laugh right in its face.”