SPEAK MEMORY, iii

SPEAK MEMORY, iii               

It began like this:under

the desk, eyes and neck covered

to keep  the soft skin  from melting

and I remember the drills and the testing

and how we all assembled on the playground

facing east and we witnessed how the sky paled.

I heard “Jackass Flats.”Where did all the blue go?

And the jump ropes all quit chanting Hot Pepper

the tether ball was a full moon in a white sky,

a sonic boom in our heads, a litany

sung for The Bay of Pigs

& the missiles

& the silos

& Castro

Cuba

communism

& Khruschschev

& the blockade of ships like silver cigars,

Sputnik wobbled across the Milky Way. Her mother died in a fire because she translated an enemy tongue. This is how we learned McCarthyism. Black lists. Red diapers. Will they send Babushka back? I imagine a chain-mail Iron Curtain. Was it like the Berlin Wall, only bigger? Memory spoke in the shape of a cloud, it became a curtain of fire and scorpions inhabited our dreams.     

 The captain shipped out to sea in darkness,

& the prayer plant folded its leaves like me.

I thought late night sounds were bombs

falling in Vietnam across the Pacific,

those planes overhead at midnight

and then, the utter stillness

jet streams  writing  the  sky

with no birds singing, crickets

all seething in the dry oat grasses.                        & there was a mysterious relative at Ground Zero

no address,  just a note saying: Hello, I’m fine.

from Los Alamos, Alamagordo, Stallion Gate,

from Oak Ridge, but we would wait a half-life

for the code names of The Manhattan Project:

We would have to wait until after the funeral

we would wait long after the dawning of Light.

& so now it begins, the waiting; only this time we’re slouching against the Darkness & the Light.

2/16/2003

© 2003 Maureen Hurley, published in My America. Brandon Mise,  Blue Barnhouse Press, Asheville, North Carolina. More on Blue Barnhouse blog.