Prypiat: A Post-Nuclear Portrait By Sara Wolfe
The wind does not blow, for fear that it will spread what man has created. The trees stand motionless except for their constant reaching towards the sky, imperceptible. Wolves slink between the day and night, no longer confined to one time or the other. They are the new rulers of this place. In the moonlight their eyes are like warning beacons that say: don’t come here. This is our home now; the earth has returned to us. This is just the beginning.
Clocks stare at the same walls that they always have, but their dulled expressions all read the same time:1:23. Posters of a Red era are peeling from the walls while boars nose through the remains of children’s books. The walls are slowly crumbling, gentle vines and other plants easing buildings to their knees. Wormwood burrows its way into swimming pools, living rooms and bedrooms. In its silent way, it proclaims that the devil’s sage green grass has found a home.
Predator and prey is the relationship that dictates this town that is no longer a town. The wolves, boars, and horses live on their own terms and only regard one another in the way that they did before man stood up-right. The horses graze in lush fields; the graveyards of industrial equipment long buried but still leaching their venom into the soil.
This is Prypiat, the land of the wolves, the land without man.
This is the online journal/blog of prize-winning author Maggie Stiefvater. This entry of hers made me want to write right now and forever!!
John Keats
(1795-1821 RIP Thing of Beauty…)
Ode on Melancholy
No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
Everett Ruess. I am always drawn back to this boy. He disappeared in the Utah in 1934 at the age of 20. He was a wanderer, a poet, an artist. It’s his fearlessness and lust for life that I envy the most.
Edward Abbey had this to say:
A Sonnet for Everett Ruess
by Edward Abbey
you walked into the radiance of death
through passageways of stillness, stone, and light,
gold coin of cottonwoods, the spangled shade,
cascading song of canyon wrens, the flight
of scarlet dragonflies at pools, the stain
of water on a curve of sand, the art
of roots that crack the monolith of time.
you knew the crazy lust to probe the heart
of that which has no heart that we could know,
toward the source, deep in the core, the maze,
the secret center where there are no bounds.
hunter, brother, companion of our days:
that blessing which you hunted, hunted too,
what you were seeking, this is what found you.
