Running a safety test. Now that is irony,
With boron rods so faultily installed
And ungodly steam pressure pushing those caps, seven hundred and seventy pound caps,
Off the reactor tops.

Turning the KGB away, Party politics, inherent contradictions;
Now those were the beginning of the end.
Promotions and favor showered and whipped,
Like so many marionette theaters ready to be burned,
As engineers-turned-politicos danced the line of a mosquito's piss
To appease the inflamed yokes of communism.

Run it! Run it! Two hundred megawatts. I shall have Party auspices.

No, write in the logbooks! We must not!

Yes. I order it.

Pray I, write it in the logbooks. I shall not bear scrutiny.

An unseen core of heat had built a spot of terrible cataclysm,
Good God! The turbines ceased their whine
For a simple test, threat only theoretical
But alive in the hearts of those who built submarines
With nuclear generators.

One man saw
Seven hundred and seventy pound caps
Pushed with steam power so forceful that
They were rocked from the reactors. He gesticulated
Insanely, as was fitting for the insanity.

One other man did not see.
He was supposed to.

'Look what's happening!'

Reactor number four!
Reactor number four!
Reactor!
Seven hundred and seventy pounds.

An explosion; fifty tons of perfect poison spit from
The bowels to sully the air and land.
Seven hundred tons more rotted.
Oh, Yuvchenko! Fomin! Faces all around scorched and covered
With blood, try to save each other,
For men were not meant to endure this!

They thought at first wave that it was an earthquake
Or war, and who are any of us to say that it wasn't all
Of these things?

Their skin would transmute, what a depraved joke; leeched
Black. Then it would peel off like Xerox powder.
Acute vomiting.

Infants parted the womb in their act of heroism
And were found to be dead.
Faces all around scorched and covered with blood,
Care not for yourself, try to save each other,
For men should not endure this!

What can blow those massive caps can bite forever,
Returning in plants and beasts, and in human beings.
Sensible Sasha, I am sorry even now. Supplication will not
Bring them all back, or bring me to them, that I might die in the effort,
But I wish it. Sasha! Hear it? Feel it?