Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Sally Carricaburu
56 years old
Anchorage, AK
Sally Carricaburu teaches high school in Anchorage, Alaska, to Alaskan Native studies. She also teaches at the University of Alaska. Her poems have been published in Interim, Alaska Quarterly Review and others. Her son,an attorney in the Army Jag Corp, will be deployeed to Iraq.
Cold War
We gather to watch the western sky fill with intercontinental ballistic missiles above Vandenberg Airforce base just thirty miles away.
We are in a cold war and we fear Communists like cancer. The missiles spurt up like tiny silver bullets, catching the light of the late afternoon sun making trails that are perfect, pink neon arcs. One time a missile fails, gamboling in wild loops, until it explodes into a sphere of rainbow colors.
My mother and her friends study bombs. They recite the mathematics of radiation: the numbers of life, half-life, no-life They describe mutant fetuses that look like frogs. Each plans the construction of a bomb shelter. My mother maps our basement, an old wine cellar, and determines it will suffice. Janie’s mom hires a bulldozer to drop a corrugated pipe, its circumference taller than me, deep into the ground. Our mothers debate how they will kill survivors of the initial blast, who will come begging outside our shelter, I see a girl, twelve, like me, beyond our shelter door.
At school, we study war, the evil communists. We watch movies of Hiroshima, see bodies and buildings piled like sticks in garbage dumps, We see children without arms or legs, faces without flesh, as if eaten by monsters. We have bomb drills: a siren screams; move away from glass, duck and cover, shield your eyes from light, the light will blind you. After the blast, wait…
I know that one day, somewhere, a small child will look up into a western sky A giant pink balloon perched on a fragile stem will rise above him and he will know all is lost
