Seventh Poem: Chernobyl Aftermath

As I re-read what I submitted for this week,  (which I've left attached at
the end) I realized that it isn't really a poem.  It's a "report.  It
doesn't leave any place for the reader to "drop in" really.  Too much of
what I write is like this:  so, I am going to try to do a version that is
less descriptive and historic and more suggestive.  

Here goes:


Chernobyl Aftermath at Pripyat

A piece of a favorite dinner plate is
glued to a kitchen wall.  The wife is
nursing her newborn.  The husband,
drunk by noon on Vodka tells her why
he is in no shape to go outside to pick
contaminated lettuce for their dinner 
salade.

The news worldwide was like a cat
with its tail caught in a door when the
favorite dinner plate was broken; nuclear
energy had clawed its way out of such
a door left ajar.

The baby nursed was the last one 
to not be deformed because the mother
swallowed too much sun.  The father
and his parents all developed scabs and
could not stand the itch or resist the 
need to scratch them. 

the neighbors baby was born without hands.
Well, she had them but they extended from
her shoulders like wings with extraordinarily
long fingers that were more like claws. 

The tantrum of the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor
reacted to a chance of freedom like the tiger
that escaped the magic show of those two famous
magicians with Russian sounding names and then
mauled, almost to death, one of them.  

Nevertheless, it was a circus-like event,  the
explosion at Chernobyl.  Luminous fish flew
like exotic birds into the sky and as it began 
to rain purple all the birch trees turned silver.

Though it was the middle of the day, the sky
turned into a radiant eye of some amoral being,
and a large part of the world was pulled into it,
into it's mesmerizing gleam like thread through
the eye of a needle pulled into a tapestry made
of souls that, those watching, could only hope
was a work of art hung in some other dimension.

KAH


Note:  this is a playful rough draft of letting go 
trying to control a poem instead of going where
it might have the energy and will to go on its own.
this is a response to one of the notes posted by Gerry
on the forum site during this workshop.

KAH









 




Chernobyl Aftermath

Peasants, with nowhere else to go,
kept fastened to their land and shacks,
clutched shards of dishes to their hearts.
Women made stews from contaminated
vegetables growing in disheveled gardens.
The men, most of them, stayed drunk.
Women opened their legs, grew babies
inside themselves.   

Pripyat was 99% contaminated by radiation,
reported the channels of World News.
Survivors would suffer bone weakness,
boils, skin lesions, jaundice and/or cancer.
These predictions were not hysterical,
they were based on scientific facts. 

Survivors who were children then,
had later, children of their own.  Most
if not all of that blighted generation
were brain damaged and/or grievously
deformed.

There was sorrow, but no guilt.
The old who managed to stay alive
described the sound and sight of
Chernobyl's nuclear explosion as
a miraculous vision!

Streams of winged beings and pods of 
luminous fish, sailed past the moon and stars,
past even, probably, the old god of the Sun-- all of them
swept into a cobalt cosmos towards the face
of an, as yet, unmet God.

In deep space, what disappeared was, perhaps,
absorbed by the radiant eye of an amoral being;
pulled through its mesmerizing gleam like a thread
through a needle; into a tapestry made of souls
that by some feat we do not comprehend, hangs
in some unfathomable dimension.

Karen Heyman

p.s.  my niece (by marriage) worked in Belarus
for 5 years with radiated and deformed children.
She had to leave due to excessive radiation to
her own body.




























Streams of winged beings 















Note:  my nephew was married to a woman who was a therapist for 
children who were grievously deformed by the Chernobyl malfunction.
She was required to retire from that after 5 years due to the radiation 
still active in the environment.