~WALT
MCDONALD~
THE
WINTER
THEY
BOMBED
PEARL
HARBOR
All winter
peacocks screamed, strutting the same
slow pose.
At dawn, we smashed the ice with hammers,
dumped pots
of boiling water steaming into troughs
for beaks
of preening peacocks. They shoved each other off
like cousins
bunched at the only mirror at church.
My logger father
whittled a forest with buzz saws,
the roar and
buzz of steel and mosquitoes
more than
my ears were tuned for.
My sister
and I played keep-away with feathers,
dazzling the
surly turkeys and peacocks with footwork,
lobbing frozen
dirt clods like grenades,
until our
father called us. When roads were frozen,
I jockeyed
the throttle of a John Deere
rusted before
the war, hauling logs and hay bales
to farmers
miles away. The war was almost lost
when my father
enlisted, Pearl Harbor bombed,
the fall of
Bataan all we heard for hours
on every station
at night, except for our parents
talking softly
after bedtime
and peacocks
screaming in the dark.
© by Walt
McDonald
