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?