Still Radioactive in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

For Aryeh

A thousand square miles—less
than a hundred people, but the wildlife
is back: brown bears, bison, lynx, elk,

even white-tailed eagles, extinct
before the meltdown. They burrow
and fly, hunt and mate, adapting

to explosions in their DNA. It’s not
like a miracle, my friend says. It is one.
Like the sunflowers grown to extract

toxins from the soil there, like sunflowers
planted to celebrate Ukraine’s nuclear
disarmament ten years later, like those

planted now, solidarity blooming
across the globe, like the blaze of sun
up my arm when that same friend—to whom

I’d said good-bye for four years each time
I saw him post-apocalypse—called from Sloan-Kettering
to say the cancer we thought fatal is cured.