1962

By Ruth Hoberman

Memorial Day, we wore white gloves
to hold the flag. Songs fluttered in our lungs
like helium: we were pilgrim and witch,
Crockett and Quaker, the slave, the raft, the shore.

We were eleven, rich in Sousaphones and common wealth,
so sure of where the river went,
we’d beg our teachers to run our movies backwards,
hooting when the aphid spat back the eaten leaf

and the scientist, stripped of his white coat by the past,
hurried back to bed, the world unlearning itself.
Less funny now the Civil War’s unfought, and dinosaurs
return, and kids in cages bawl for their parents

while some guy in a uniform sends them back
and back and back. I was so sure America moved—
like tunnels, time, and rivers—toward the light.

Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Chicago but residing in New Haven, Connecticut to be near her daughter and her family during the pandemic. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Smartish Pace, Rhino, Calyx, Adirondack Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review and her essays in Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence, and The Examined Life. She is a professor emerita of English at Eastern Illinois University, where she taught for thirty years, specializing in modern British literature.

Photo credit: Khairil Zhafri via a Creative Commons license.