Thank you for coming.
What I want to know is why does the Persona Magazine people get
cookies and I don't?
When I Was Conceived.
It was 1945 and it was May.
White crocus bloomed in St Louis.
The Germans gave in but the war shoved on.
And my father came home from work
that evening tired and washed his hands,
not picturing the black goggled men with code names fashioning
an atomic bomb.
Maybe he loved his wife that evening,
maybe after eating she smoothed his jawline in her palm
as he stretched out on the couch with his head in her lap
while Bob Hope spoofed Hirohito on the radio
and they both laughed.
My father sold used cars at the time and didn't like it.
So if he complained, maybe she held him
an extra moment in her arms.
The heat in the air pressing between them,
so they turned upstairs early that evening arm and arm
without saying anything.
I wrote that poem when I was teaching
a course in the 20th century, humanities,
and reading a lot of histories and discovered
that I was conceived between the time
that the Germans surrendered and the bomb
was dropped on Hiroshima, which somehow struck me
as an apt metaphor.
I also read at the University of Virginia last year and someone
who taught there xeroxed that poem and gave it to his class
and had them all write when I was conceived poems
as an exercise.
They were very similar to this one, but all of their poems
had their parents watching television instead of
listening to the radio.