Following up on last week’s post about a woman’s photoblogging-by-motorcycle in the Chernobyl dead zone, this somewhat older collection of poems by a Chernobyl survivor — and an online collection of images documenting her journey back to the site.
Lybov Sirota once worked as director of a writing program for children near the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. Before April 25th, 1986, she’d never written poetry. That night, she needed a breath of fresh air; she walked out on her balcony in Pripyat and watched Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor explode. The radioactivity exposure caused Sirota and her son, Sasha, to become very ill. She began writing poetry about the experience. In 2000, her son persuaded her make a pilgrimage to their their former home; that journey is documented here.
Link to poems, Link to photo series.
(Thanks, muonzoo.)