Ghost Cities
Sunken in seas! engulfed by tsunamis!
Buried under lava, mud-slides
and avalanches of ice or rock,
smothered in jungles or swamps,
lost under sand and in silt?
Swallowed by coastal erosion, sinkholes and land-slides,
obliterated by meteorite falls,
and volcanic mega-eruptions;
Natures’ and Super-nature's tools.
Some are unearthed, carbon-dated archaeologically,
or put together and located
from myth, folklore and historical record;
satellite imagery?
Chichen Itza, Karakoram, Subashi, Xanadu, Angkor, Nineveh,
Ashgabad, Cahokia, Vilcabamba, Pompeii, Cahuachi, Suakin,
Petra, Skara Brae - all had their time and left evidence or legend.
Here and now,
within a few decades,
a mere half a generation
see Pripyat, Kolmanskop, Wunsdorf, Tianducheng, Detroit!
Great sub and urban sprawls of dessicated city-scapes:
their parks, churches, schools, municipal buildings,
highways, apartment blocks, hospitals, malls,
factories, business and banking quarters;
their wrecked infrastructure
in stark, post-apocalyptic relief,
powerless, unpeopled.
Only trees and grass survive.
When the inhabitants left en masse,
communities fell apart
and their cities died without them;
the mansions crumbled, tiles slid,
balconies slipped from glassless, gaping windows,
doors hung ajar, deserted parking lots were littered with masonry,
twisted girders, rubble, cables and scrap.
Little different from being bombed into extinction,
razed to the ground by retreating invaders
a la Oradour-sur-glane, Grozny, Aleppo, Craco, Aghdam, Khearson.
The blitzkrieg, atrocities and bombing of Dresden
, Nagasaki, Coventry, Hamburg, Hiroshima,
and the Gallipoli bombardment;
as well as latterly, the exhaustion and demise of mining towns
(diamonds, asbestos, gypsum, lead, iron ore, pyrite, uranium, copper, silver,
nickel, feldspar, bauxite, lithium, gold (with its collateral mercury exposure)
in Arizona, Oklahoma, California Kolmanskop, Witwatersrand,
Alaska, Valdeluz, Bodie, Dagestan.
Or sacrificed by dams:
Shi Cheng, Potosi, Kalyazin, Vilarinho, Taf Fechan.
Historic mass evacuations from thousands of rural Iberian villages
whether from drought, pestilence, war or for work,
on-going today in the Gangetic
and Yangtze flood plains due to man-made rising oceans.
People sought refuge and left with their children
escaping the dangers of riot, arson, famine, flood, looting,
conscription, persecution and poverty,
leaving everything behind.
All that remained were roofless houses and the gaunt skeletons
of long deserted buildings,
rusting metalwork, peeling facades
rotting timbers.
Even the dogs, gone feral, found nothing to scavange.
A free-for-all for rats, termites, ants, fungi, birds and bats.
Along with the detritus of every day,
every family home:
broken furniture, mouldy furnishings, junked pictures, books, toys…
copper wiring, cook-ware and utensils, noticeably absent.
…..
Fast forward, from the fixtures and securities of today’s conurbations,
their arrogant cultural certainties:
for dry and safe lodging, comfort,
sources of food, employment, community, civil law and order
to find they can disappear in a blink
reversed to primitive survival
amid the gaunt grave-yard bones
of cement, steel.
Oct