New Poetry by Les Wicks

BURNT RUBBER AT THE DEAD ZONE

Elena has a new art, her brushes

this black Kawasaki Big Ninja, ZZR-1100, plus a radiation detector.

Girl of speed and silence,

technology beyond fingers, a stretched drum-skin of abyss

and straw where the Monkey Law of Curiosity is written in poison.

She rides through Chernobyl taking photos – the Luminous Law of Poke.

Snow promises “reconciliation”.

A few declining shards of occupation, even tour guides

but visitors cannot stay -

canned by quiet, the innate dissonance

of human clutter without the tribe…

well-fed eyes skitter, shoulder muscles clench beside placards

for the 1986 Mayday Parade

Party of Lenin leads us to the Triumph of Communism.

Magazines unread, Fish and Hunt.

Kindergarten trips are postponed

for 30 generations.

"Chernobyl" means wormwood and

is an iridescent palette. This woman passes

rusting nests of tanks, Sikorski bones. My own

daughter was born that week 1986, this alp of news and a slow, implacable

gyre of contractions as we watched Nightmare on Elm St, then Cheers.

A hoar of antiquity in the toss of their manes
Prejevalsky Horses shave grasslands, this new age of life -

roses go the way

of any managed thing.

Peace is imposed on this tiny patch as

confident wolves ignore the scent of dead farmyards.

Wild boar multiply, move in to simple wooden huts that

drink radiation but refuse to desert

their contract of shelter.

The Ferris ("Devil's") Wheel will not turn.

Washing, 20 years untouched, still on the line.

Vovik + Tanya = love (maybe still/

600 miles away and them nervously with new children

waiting for the taint).

Elena reassures us

that bitumen protects,

doses at their lowest in the centre of roads.

No one is surprised by this, enduring haven of we beasts that ate.

Is this the last human ecology?

Roars of our engines, the septic gasp.

Opal eyes peering from tarmacadam coats.

Les Wicks 2007