The Old Raptures [Chernobyl]
I want to tell you about the birds. How I imagine they
quieted one by one until there was just one left, trilling
its single, unchanging note into the dark. Or maybe
it was that they fell silent all at once in the moments
that led to the explosion, in a sort of expectation humans
never learned: the instinctual, deferential.… Read the rest