Poems by David Cazden
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Feral Dogs of Chernobyl
–World's worst nuclear accident, 1986
by David Cazden
David lives between the Clark's Run Watershed and the Dix River Watershed in the western Bluegrass area of Central Kentucky. The land behind his home is still undeveloped, and if he wakes up early in summer, he is graced with the morning mist.
Radiation lurks invisibly
appearing only in pictures
on old fashioned film—
flashing like apparitions
in videos of abandoned schoolrooms,
over hastily dropped dolls
and dust covered shoes.
For earth never stays still,
licking its own wounds
of poison rivers, stunted meadows
and mutated fields.
Yet somewhere, paws plow in dirt,
insect antennae probe wavelengths
of tainted air. And the children
of the children of the children
of our abandoned pets remain.
Science thinks they're evolving faster,
that their DNA's mutating more
and perhaps they won't howl
at sickle moons
or keen in shrunken forests
that inexplicably turned red
where they dart shadow to shadow.
Living only three years,
each generation renews
the way all feral pets do—
When an invisible thread
tears from the womb,
unraveling a hole in space,
the pups crawl through
onto the ground, somehow
made new, yet different,
fallen stars all around them.
© David Cazden