In eighth grade, after I was moved to the front,
but before we watched the shuttle separate in two,
there were lessons on New Madrid.
I'd imagine standing in my plaid uniform only to
find myself doing an Armageddon-type of split
looking down at flames and pitchfork yielding monsters
confirming the lesson of 5th hour Guilt 101.
One funny thing about classroom lessons is this:
I have never since heard such talk of earthquakes.
And when I think of young fright I realize this:
Unlike my children, I never knew the word terrorist
Unlike my father, I never feared the communists.
Things I no longer believe include:
Mine will be a death by earthquake.
There is a god who punishes.
I do not jolt upright at two a.m. thinking of the devil peering
into my open and bare private parts as I straddle a moving fault line,
girls do not do acrobats with the ground moving beneath them.
I will never look down at my hell-fate shouting
I should have known better and left Missouri!
I am not brave for staying here and this is not a danger zone.
There are much graver faults than those that lie
beneath my home state crust and my sense of steady and balance
has not been intact since long before 1986
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2 comments:
wowwiiieee! you took me back to my own eighth grade, and even earlier, to the fourth, when a teacher paddled me because i messed up on the lord's prayer,put blisters on me too, and caused a melee between the woman and my mother, who, whatever her faults, did not take no shit from anybody when it came to her children.
strange, isn't it, how very different we all are, and how much the same.
when i was in the second grade, the other students would make fun of my german name, and call me nazi and hitler. when i told my father, he said
just tell them you're jewish.
i do think the real world started to crumble when that shuttle broke in two.
this poem is more lived in than narrated, and has no nostalgia to it at all. very fine work.
I hope i am a mother like yours was. I just am struck by how adults create fears, and children buy them, non-thinking adults do too, actually. I researched the New Madrid fault and learned that there is absolutely no chance there will be an earthquake here in my lifetime of any magnitude, yet they had us scared senseless...why?
thanks for stopping by
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