We were in our beds or daydreaming
out a window in school,
or we were simply running, the fleet
childish joy of motion through a still, dusty field.
It was silence that shattered.
In 1961 I was dreaming baseball
when the bomb of air blew up. The bed
lurched, I raised my head to hear the windows
clattering in their frames, my mother’s trinkets ringing.
And when I settled back into sleep, the room fell away.
There was a rush of dreams like stars,
the rustle of bedclothes trailing off.
At the end of its road in Illinois
my father’s house sat cracking in the cold.
A light from the kitchen window shone
a rectangle in the snow, my father
at the table yawning toward work.
The sweep of his hair left a mark on the window.
He leaned to see. A high flash
crossed the sky, the brief faded wash of its roar.
This is for you in that airplane, the exhilaration
you must have felt, my father cursing you
for everyone on earth.