Radioactive Hope

It saved them all, you know;
those caught within last
slow throe of extinction
inevitable in the face
of so-called human progress;

For in that final place of wilderness
men were busy building homes
and businesses
stripping woodlands, plowing meadows,
paving marshes,
crowding out solitude and beauty
they sought with so much diligence,
killing off the very thing they wanted
with the squirming thick
of swelling human masses.

Villages and towns spread cancerous
deep into wetland, vale and forest,
streams and rivers slowly swallowed
by retention ponds and reservoirs,
good earth and pure water
stained by pesticides and run-off
the air itself thickening
with growing traffic
as wilderness became a remnant ache
of narrowing habitat even rats
found unsustainable.

Until the accident occured,
and poison spread across the world.

in close-by places newborn's brains
grew outside their skulls
and children with too many limbs
or not enough became so common
whole industries of formal care sprang up
as parents walked away from babies
made monsterous by damaged genes,
and of the heros
who fought the blaze that sent
poisoned clouds across the land
few survived the battle
even though they won the war.

Thousands fled,
every single piece of life
abandoned in their haste
to flee from
unseen contaminating killer,
entire towns and cities
suddenly abandoned
in the face of fear
of what had happened
as government declared disaster
and covered melted fuel rods
with tons of leaded sand,
concrete and gravel

Yet in the quarter-century since
radiation spilled into our lives
and chased humanity away
the smouldering remains
of old disrupted lives
have become wilderness again,
rich with wolf, boar,
bison, pony,
badger, bear, lynx and hare
lives shortened by poison
yet unhunted,
changed, but free once more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yE25jUWZEo