Atomic War and the Baseball Championship At Stake
by Steven McCabe
Earlier that day in school
We were told to ‘duck and cover.’
The teacher explained:
Those communists will soon lay waste
To the surrounding farmland and fields,
The blast will be as brilliant as the sun.
Do not look into it!
Charred flesh and animal remains will be
Driven by the force of the wind through the classroom windows.
Pray to god they do not launch multiple warheads:
Evaporating the dairy farms,
Tractor dealerships and pine forests.
You must, as one, kneel beneath your desks,
Noses pressed into the floor,
Knuckles clasped firmly behind your heads,
Under no circumstances open your eyes!
I stared at lines
On the wooden floor
Wondering how deep
The grooves went.
Sometimes they led us into the basement,
Turning the lights off:
I listened to breathing
In the black, damp air:
A multitude of moist
Nostrils inhaling
Cold
Concrete.
That night at the baseball game we were playing for the championship.
‘Everything depends on tonight’s effort,’ said the coach.
‘Everything.’
poemimage 
That’s you in the picture, isn’t it? Oh… how well I remember sitting under my desk and all you describe here Steven. It was so much a part of growing up in the Cold War.
I used to wonder about the people in Russia and feel for them….the propaganda, the inforced separation from the rest of the world. What it presented to their imaginations. The challenges…the bleakness.
Of course I was a child then. Imagination doesn’t have to die. The same nonsense is thrown at us continually. It is just someone’s game. One good thing about growing up!
I love the twist of responsibility on your part for winning the championship, Steven. Us girls … were never challenged this way back then. We would just die in the flames.
This is a great post Steven. It’s made my evening!
hi Jana, thank you for this comment. You remember this too! What a crazy thing to go through. Intriguing that you had empathy for the ‘enemy’ noncombatants. Not sure it ever entered my young ‘non-expansive’ mind!
Yes, the girls would just die in the flames. What a vivid image and yet that is it in a nutshell. It seems very few women or girls were involved in the decision making. I’m sure they would just ‘get in the way’ of good, sensible, mass extinction, Strangelovian planning.
So glad it made your evening!
You blow and blow and continue to blow my mind Steven…When I was a teacher this drill was then for earthquakes, not atomics anymore…a similar drill was in case of attack by gun wielding teens, disillusioned by the system and low marks in art class…There was also always the possibility that bears or beavers might coordinate an offense against our innocent vulnerability.
When I was a child, on the winning side of WW2, still the sirens, just in case…and the under desk dance…it never ends, ever, the fear…
Thank you John for these thoughts and I appreciate that you find these posts of value. Our experiences intersect.
Have you heard that Cohen song with the line, ‘I haven’t been this happy since the end of WW2.’ I’m sure you have.
Your comment has me thinking now of sirens. When sirens were sirens….
I’m also thinking of school dances (“under desk dance”) and imagining the desks brought out onto the gym floor… readied for ‘Duck and Cover’…just in case the….bears…or beavers…
The weight we carried as little ones… I wonder how much really does depend on them. Thank you, Steven, for your story and for playing like everything depends on it.
Thank you Jack, now I am thinking of the William Carlos Williams poem The Red Wheelbarrow:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
I wonder if this was on your mind when you commented. I’m extrapolating now the childhood baseball to art and words. Playing one’s way out of the fear and engulfing terrors.
Wonderful post, Steven.
Hi Richard, thanks much! Glad you like it!