August 7, 2018To the Firefighters Sleeping in the Yard
Statistically, your mothers know, those hotshot
tragedies hardly ever happen. They worry more
for your lungs, your feet (twenty-six bones
of curled arboreal they once could hold). They worry
what you’re eating (warm burritos wrapped in foil,
handed to you by a shy two-year-old girl) and of course
they dream of horses running, a cat taking refuge
under a car that flashes, boils, melts, they dream
of the strange tornadoes birthing, devouring,
throwing metal and glass, dream of the houses
they raised you in, the thin roofs peeling up,
how the smoke whistles and crackles with its particles
that were everything, everyone it took, how it snows
its flecks of everything, everyone down like night,
like sleep.
Statistically, one grown child looks
much like another, sooty, spent, a war-stained face
turned away. This infuriates mothers, not knowing
if you’re theirs while they scratch at the screen trying
to blow up some twice-removed photo (taken by a man
whose house you saved with your axes that slumber
beside you and a single hose stretched to the limit,
now slack). But any mother (anyone) can recognize
this: the way you curl against the ground while catastrophe
shrieks on, how you (all of us) have to lay down
your weapons just for an hour and sink into that
dark old well of refuge, one hand between your knees.
from Poets Respond