The Trumpet Angel

At the memorial complex stands an angel welded from black steel rods, blowing a trumpet: the Third Angel, from the Revelation verse about the star called Wormwood that fell on the waters. Chornobyl means wormwood. The monument does not explain this; it assumes you know, and here everyone does.

Against the white sky it reads as a drawing made of wire, weightless and severe at once. I stood below it longer than the cold approved.

I write about signals, and this is the region's oldest one: a verse, a plant, a name, a catastrophe, all resonating across two thousand years into welded steel. No transmitter required. Some frequencies are carried by language alone.