HUSH

Silent grey modernist castle
sits quivering attentive
with delayed shock
On desolate purple moor
Sheep huddle nervously
Too frit to leave
Cables and wire delimit the senses 

– bar one.
It hears, patient and soundless
Trembling in the heat
Of a cold war
Testing for sound from
The steppes. 

The hum
Of covert chatter
The mutter of
Soviet speech
A relic forgotten
Triple ears bent east
Biding its time, awaiting its moment
to sense the fissile spark
taste the tang of metal crackling and deadly
fulfilling its design
one single time
before silence falls
like ash, forever