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Öykü Türkan

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+'''Post-Human Pastoralism'''
+''(Afterland fragments from Ida-Viru)''
+Here is Ida-Viru,
+a place not made to be seen,
+but to hold what’s left.
+A lake that shouldn’t be a lake,
+an engineered stillness.
+A basin designed to settle,
+but nothing truly settles.
+I walked here once.
+Mud pulled at my shoes.
+Footprints filled with water.
+This water carries what oil shale leaves behind:
+calcium oxide, sulphates, silica dust, aluminium, iron oxides.
+Can I swim in this water?
+What does alum do to my skin?
+A brief evidence of a body passing through.
+Even still water remembers movement.
+Even waste listens, holds a rhythm.
+'''Time moves differently here.'''
+'''Slower, maybe.'''
+As if the land itself asked for silence.
+I stood still long enough to listen.
+To wonder –
+Who once labored here,
+and is no longer?
+The lake holds more than minerals.
+It holds life, and death, and memory.
+Bodies that bent.
+Dreams built on wages,
+then broken by exposure.
+Those who worked here
+spoke a language now made foreign,
+carried histories of distant lands,
+and vanished borders.
+The shadow of a fallen empire.
+'''This isn’t a place where nature returns'''
+'''because it never fully left.'''
+It only adapted,
+took on new shapes,
+learned to grow sideways.
+This land is not ruined.
+Not restored.
+It is something else,
+'''''an afterland?'''''
+A man-made mountain,
+a man-made lake,
+a beach of accidental origin.
+This is what a post-human pastoral might feel like:
+'''Not untouched,'''
+'''but touched too many times.'''
+Can we build a landscape
+without meaning to?
+'''Can we scar the earth'''
+'''into the illusion of beauty?'''
+And if we do,
+will we remember
+what was sacrificed here?
+The hands that labored,
+lungs burned by dust,
+the days folded into silence.
+Not everything left behind is waste.
+Some things remain
+to hold the memory.
+'''Are we willing to hear it?'''