Horses in Chernobyl, Ukraine (Wikimedia Commons)
Summernote V
Call her goddess of heath and yellow gorse. Tell her you have left the moon unlit. Snuggled into its folds. Swamp-fed forest creeks. Grafted to fen carr, sedge grasses. Dwarf blackberries. See if she believes you. You can neglect wood bluebells, red-purple milkweed, these rimes, flowerings begging for time. Paper birch trees that chafe refrains, disjunctions, oxygen for photosynthesis. How a butterfly pupa fastens its body to a green leaf before eclosing. Tell her it’s the Earth here. Tell her escape won’t work, this far into the scrub habitat. How over there in flattened boxes sits Pirka Ort, clawed wheat fields knotted in dirt. Excavating a nunnery manor. Cherry trees. Plum. Stripping away punctuation. Tell her that you are out here all alone. Tell her. You have summoned the wind. Swallows flying low. Smell of petrichor after rain falls. The blood of the stone. See if she believes you.
Chernobyl
miniature gas masks
an empty glass milk bottle
atomic sunflowers
rodents in the ground
live plutonium-packed prey
wind in pine forest
post-apocalyptic
Ferris wheel in Pripyat
radioactive boars
a camera drone
woodland around Chernobyl
song of marsh warbler
thatched roof log houses
carvings around window frames
Rosa’s potato patch
Totenwald
I will go now, learn the language of the
woods, and go to the huts, where the flautists
are practising, the sky violet. I will
learn the trees. Gneiss hillocks of mosses.
I shall weave and knot jute ropes around grey
bark and branches. Lime-green wings and
furry white body. Obits for those whose cairns are
missing, those who are numbers. Pupa of the
Luna moth eclosing, I will journey through
the Totenwald, a boggy, stygian fen.
Blueberries and wild roses standing in the sphagnum,
knots and ropes, using ropes as lines, an ode I use
to knot each piece, cocoon wrapped in leaves as home.
I will go now where river birch grows. Hold a
wake among rhodora, red osier dogwood withy.
I hear a small blackwater stream
quarrelling with metaphor. Acid rain in understory.
Wetness the shape of water on skin.
The bodies we speak of inhabiting.
Papery white moonflowers. A bittern calls.
