
Dear Emily of Sixth Grade
How youthful our sensorium:
girl near girl, a school
and its red-brick body
pressed forward,
eager to leave
the long decade.
A TV on a wheeled cart lit
with images of the hollow
and the light — bones
tumbled into earth, soldiers
liberated in black and white,
a shuttle exploded then divided
in streaks of gauzy smoke,
girls our size scattered
and running from villages.
Outside is spring, and a mass grave
of flies forms in the window well,
and here our faces float
in the darkness of the room.
The sudden idea like shrapnel
across the hot and sleepy room —
that we will be large out there,
that we might build houses
on top of these funeral parlors
in our minds,
we don’t even know
what from someday,
we don’t know how lonely,
don’t know how walking
our children past well-lit gardens
we will grow older, smaller
like ice caps melting.
But here in this classroom,
Emily of sixth grade, we sit
only us — alive in the strangest way,
our four small hands low-amplitude
in their tremor, hidden in our laps,
shuddering with promise to run
step by every step ahead
of the explosion.