The Wild Horses of Chernobyl by Martha Silano

The Wild Horses of Chernobyl

by Martha Silano

I can’t stop thinking about the wild horses of Chernobyl,

keep going back to the sepia photographs, horses

with glowing eyes, living in a town where 33 years ago

the residents were ordered to evacuate, take only

essentials, leave their televisions and clothes,

their furniture and artwork, their cars. Were told

it would just be a few days, that the police would guard

their homes. I can’t stop looking into the eyes of the horses,

peering into the crumbling buildings and barns

where they breed and sleep, head shake and shy.

What the horses see is rubble, deteriorating dolls,

empty bottles of wine. What the horses know is relief

from the elements. What the horses are safe from:

boars, lynx, wolves—animals who’ve taken refuge

in a human-less place. What they’re safe from: us.

This poem begins "I can’t stop thinking about the wild horses of Chernobyl" and since I read this poem a couple of weeks ago, I cannot stop thinking about it!

You had me at wild horses. You had me at Chernobyl. Put them together and I am there for good. Happily, the rest of the poem stands up with the title/first line.

If "horses with glowing eyes" does not grab you, I don't know what will. (And here is a link to a Nat Geo photo essay about the Chernobyl animals, including the horses.) It is such a vivid image, and then Silano swings back to the people and the lies they were told when ordered to evacuate.

But even this heartbreaking information cannot keep the speaker from those horses, and she returns with "I can’t stop looking into the eyes of the horses," repeating the structure of the first line, repeating the eerie nature of those eyes, and setting us up for the next set of images. The human things left behind to decay are described with the animals' actions.

The poem ends with a kicker. Even living here in this contaminated and creepy place, the horses are safer there than elsewhere, because there are no people. And if you think this is hyperbole, it is not. The wild horses in Chernobyl are Przewalski's horses, a type of horse hunted almost to extinction. And the horse that was native to Chernobyl, the Tarpan, no longer exists, thanks to humans.

Although this poem is about a place contaminated by a human-made disaster, it also reminds us that humans are known for destroying nature in other ways as well.

This poem by Martha Silano was first published in Terrain, and you can find it here. Since reading this poem, I have bought one of her books and plan to get more. I hope you, dear reader, feel this way about Silano and all the poets whose wonderful poems I post here. And the same goes for the literary journals and anthologies where I find many of the poems here.