I was there not long after the explosion.

Not in the first hours, when everything was still unnamed, when even those closest did not yet understood what had happened. But soon enough for the air to carry something that could not be seen and could not be refused. The land was quiet, but not with peace. It was not even silence. It was as if matter itself had withdrawn its trust.

Years later, I encountered the same fracture again – far from the fields and forests – in the sterile brightness of hospital rooms in Israel. Orthodox patients, some of them, their bodies marked not only by visible wounds but by something working from within, without image, without contour. You could speak to them, pray with them, hold a hand. But the body itself no longer answered as one expects.

The body does not cry out when it collapses in this way. It withdraws. Cell by cell. Word by word.

Since then, one name has remained: Chernobyl.

People say it means wormwood. In Russian and Ukrainian, it refers to a dark weed, a plant of the artemisia family: Chernobyl – Чернобыль / Чорнобиль –  טשערנאָביל. And inevitably, the association arises with the Book of Revelation – the falling star called Wormwood, turning waters bitter.

But catastrophe is not the execution of a script. Humans do not “recognize prophecy fulfilled.” They reach, rather, for older words when language fails them. They borrow echoes.

What happened there was not only an explosion. It was a moment when matter itself ceased to be trustworthy.

Water, air, soil – the elements that sustain life – became uncertain. Invisible. The body, which depends on them, entered into doubt with its own environment. And perhaps more deeply still: the body entered into doubt with itself.

It is from within that space that I wrote this Yiddish poem: Times of war – a balagan of bodies and voices/מ-לחמה, בשר און מן־מן

מלחמה־צײַטן ־ אַ באַלאַגאַן פֿון גופֿים און געשרײַ,קריג־לידער שמעקן מיט אַ שװאַכן טעם פֿון ליבשאַפֿט.מען זאָגט: דאָס איז אַלט־נײַ, אַ חידושאָבער דאָס בלוּט װײַזט און שרײַט אַרוּם.

Times of war – a chaos of bodies and cries,war-songs carry a faint taste of love.They say: old-new, a strange novelty,but the blood shows itself and cries out.

בשר איז דאָ ־ בשר ודם, ניט קײַן........

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