No.4 Reactor Poem by Mark Heathcote

We hid from radioactive rainfall
just a couple of days after, boastful
each raindrop a wheeled poison claymore
what cost, a disaster like Chernobyl?
We see Ferris wheels stopped, timeless and still,
a tellers-till surrounded by gas masks
in the ghost town of Pripyat's dead dunghill
that hi-tech city; now its epitaphs-
are empty litter-free quiet pavements?
An abandoned amusement park that sees
a new kind of tourism on hiatus
to that: No.4 Reactor like honeybees
for that one cool cold exclusion-zone-glimpse
of where the Elephant's Foot lies, exists.

Look, they walk laughing towards that abyss
hoping their skin doesn't burst out in cysts
what cost, a disaster like Chernobyl?
Tourist numbers-up 50,000 rising - year on year
this now a profiteering ambrosial
-radioactive world, this new-frontier
it makes my heart sear like flesh on a grill.
The absence of sanity - reflection,
humour, barbarity out-for-a-frill
looking at the horror the abjection
of a post-apocalyptic wasteland,
with not a single living soul in sight
just some large aluminum spacecraft
awaiting its first and last, maiden flight.