In Brooklyn,
in 1953, the air raid
sirens would wail
their warning once
or twice a week.
We would
dive under our desks,
assuming the half-inch
oak would protect us
from anything,
although the teachers
never assured us.
My brother assured me
my eyes would boil
in their sockets,
my charred skin
would peel
from my bones,
and no one
would know me from the skeletons
in the Museum of Natural History.
My parents said
that was silly talk,
but my brother told me
the commies had a missile
trained on the Empire
State Building
with a blast radius of 13 miles
and we were within the blast zone.
“Fortunately, he said, the bomb will incinerate us
before the blast blows us apart.
You’re toast,” he added,
taking a huge bite of the rye bread
that he had slathered
with half a stick of butter.
I couldn’t get the eyeballs
out of my mind,
and the day mom left me to shop,
the sirens wailed,
and I hid in the closet
covered in coats.
For the next month
or so, mom would tell friends
and relatives she found
me wailing louder
than any siren
could, and I might
be an instrument of Civil Defense.
70 years later, sirens still
make me close my eyes tighter than tight.
Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and is poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. Steve's full-length books, Persistence of Memory, Going, Going, Gone, and Slipping Away, were also published by Kelsay Press. Another poetry collection, Brooklyn, was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press and his latest full-length book, Seven Mountains, was just published.
Wow...this poem is great in so many ways. There's even a Catcher in the Rye feel to the poem, the nod to Caulfield's Nat History museum (the only place that never changed in his world = not phoney) and even rye bread.
ReplyDeleteI was nine when The Day After aired, and could remember being so frightened as conversations arose in class about it the next day. But Rocky IV would assuage those fears only two years later, in 1985, when he gave his "If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change" speech to Gorbachev's standing ovation.
This poem does an excellent job highlighting the psychological effects surrounding the impending doom of nuclear war, especially in regards to children, with a POV that's both super original and, at times, sardonic. This is giving George Carlin vibes:
We would
dive under our desks,
assuming the half-inch
oak would protect us
from anything,
Thank you for this poem. It's blew me away, pun intended.