Post
by Tim J Brennan » Thu Aug 16, 2018 8:15 pm
Fragments of Chernobyl
The Ukrainian dancer told me two minutes
to hold up my fingers and she would stop
giving her love words to her husband,
he the soldier with skin cancer,
one of thousands who rushed in
to Chernobyl, to guard the peasants,
to help everyone before they died. I listened
to this overseas call, for thirty seconds,
for one minute. I heard her gathered words,
her spontaneous love over five thousand miles
away, her love expectations, her love greeting,
her love farewell, fierce but one-sided.
For the final minute, my finger rose in the air
through huskiness, a click, a tremble of upper lip,
placing the phone in its cradle like a baby,
she turned to me, bent down, and kissed
my cheek: Thank you, thank you she mumbled
in broken English, turned and left
to her broken bed, to her broken life. Nothing
more available this night. Orders had been given,
loyal soldiers were dying, and the silent traffic
of overseas calls was coming-and-going,
held in check by the taut political reality
of two different worlds and a grainy silence.
