This is a little poem called Drill.
And it's for a friend of mine, John Skoyles.
It's about all those air-raid drills
that we had when we were kids in school.
It's about just afterwards.
When the buzzer sounded again, the children
got up from under their desks and brushed off their knees.
The flies and the light fixtures continued to sleep.
The hydrangeas went on nodding their soft blue heads
against the windows.
The clock was still running.
There was no blood on the floor.
But some of the children listened uneasily
to the high drone of a plane.
While others picked up their pencils and went back to work,
drawing spiders and flames in the margins of notebooks.
It was an ordinary day, belonging
to others, touched briefly by the future, which
was theirs to survive.