alphabet of death:
By ending her poem with the "alphabet of death," Kostenko establishes that society's fixation on scientific progress at the expense of human lives has divested language of its ability to articulate the conditions of the present and imagine a future. Any attempts at linguistic representation must culminate in the "death" symbolized by the nuclear power station. As such, language itself collapses in the face of Chernobyl.
As Jean-Luc Nancy writes in After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, "We live no longer either in tragic meaning nor in what, with Christianity, was supposed to transport and elevate tragedy to divine salvation . . . We are being exposed to a catastrophe of meaning." [1] In other words, Chernobyl is disastrous not because of what it represents, but because it defies representation of any kind.
[1] Nancy, Jean-Luc. After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Fordham University Press, 2015.