Chernobyl Mayday - An Essay
...he Chernobyl incident occurred, towards the end of April and nearing May. The first stanza uses a figure of speech to surprise the reader, and to make the reader think about Chernobyl in a way they might not have before. It uses the nursery rhyme “Goldilocks” and relates it to the effects of radioactive fallout on crops and dairy farms. The milk in the porridge that Goldilocks was going to eat would have been poisoned, due to the fallout affecting cows and its milk. The honey cells would also been poisoned as fallout affected a large majority of the life in that area, including bees. The poem has an underlying message that shows the incident was a problem at the reactor but the effects were felt much worse in the surrounding crops and farms. The first stanza is an example of this, but also the second and third stanza. The rescue crews spent a lot of effort containing and eradicating the blaze but there was nothing they could do to prevent the further widespread damage from the fallout. In the first line of the third stanza, it uses personification to show how the radioactive “showers” of fallout destroyed the crops. “And heavy is the promise of harvest” is an ironic statement, as the promise of harvest would have been very poor due to the damage incurred from the fallout. Considering Ukraine is...