I thought it would be a good idea to teach them mindfulness practice to ease their anxiety from war.
Lila Dlaboha is a poet born of Ukrainian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She was short-listed for the Poetry International Prize 2021, and is a 2018 finalist, for her full-length manuscript, in the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize judged by Jane Hirshfield. Her poems have appeared in Arts & Letters (Georgia College), Bellevue Literary Review, Mudfish, Andre Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse, among other publications. During the 1980s she served on the editorial board of the Little Magazine, a nationally distributed literary quarterly. By profession she worked many years as a photo or text editor on general-interest magazines and the newswire before managing an international photo agency specializing in history. On and off for the past six years she has been volunteering in the war zones of eastern Ukraine under the auspices of the Ukrainian NGO GoGlobal/GoCamp. She lives in New York City.