Black Earth

In techno-malaise, Mother Russia, how you truly coughed hard, Four and twenty million to be baked in your back yard, Spewed forth black wrath that wrought black earth, Glowing wombs impregnated to give unwanted birth, Radiation rape as intense as a thousand Hiroshima’s, Flesh and bone infected with such pretty nuclear glimmers. The graveyards in their endless dreaming swelled, are swelling still, From twice the normal defects of birth and future sons to kill, To accommodate more excess dead than Stalin’s purges in these lands, Infected with radioactive iodine - a hundred thousand thyroid glands; The death toll more than the last world war could ever seek to boast, Eight hundred thousand children with leukaemia suffer most. Humankind smashed, crushed, bathed in ashes, debased, destroyed again, From the gaping mouth of Belarus down the throat of the Ukraine, Chernobyl dies in shame at the cursing of her name… Should not the powers that be in power sincerely feel the same?