| AMIDA TRUST | |
Poetry The Deadlands by Prasada Caroline Brazier |
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They are opening the dead-lands today Taking away the skeletons of wire, whose jagged barbs, Like the unseen dying, bound the land. Mesh gates swing on rusted hinges, To break a century of silence. Our vehicles drive deserted roads That stretch between the scrub, grim travesties of plants A hundred miles or more The instrument clicks within permitted levels Marking time. Blighted hillsides sectioned by fallen fences and tangled farm tracks And time by time a farmstead Betrayed upon its mother soil Beside the stream which brought it life At mid-day when the sun was high and angry in the sky We reach a farm house Suckled in a copse of withered trees and half invaded by encroaching weeds Which thrived. We enter seeing rest A world, frozen in archaic charm. The loaf of bread lies on the kitchen table, hardened by the years A child's toy where it fell Lost in the scrambled salvage As they fled To what perverted end? They have opened the dead-lands today And woken ghosts who left no memories P.C.J. Brazier NOTE: This poem was written after the Chernobyl disaster when a nuclear power station became lethal in Russia in 1986 |