Angel Feathers Tickle Me

The sound a bomb makes

is easy enough to mistake,

easy enough to set aside

when there is work at hand,

and even as we step from our offices

and peer upward at the

higher floors of the building,

we are expecting to see that

something has fallen,

because that noise, that profound bang

seemed like a falling body,

a book cart, perhaps, precipitated

from the top floor and coming

to rest outside our door,

but there is nothing, nothing but

faces looking down at us,

asking the same mute question,

wondering the same thing,

not yet ready to consider that

we have been blown up,

and we go back to work,

backto mundane tasks

until the callto evacuate comes to us, and

even then, we walk calmly,

shrugging, into the open,

under the iron gray sky,

and we are directed to cross the street,

to get further from the building,

to establish a safe distance

and let thegathering authorities do their work

and we stand together in the spitting rain

and speak of it, not knowing,

and it was only a small bomb,

after all, and no one was hurt,

so we joke about perhaps blowing us up on a sunny day,

so that standing on the public green

while police tape is spread

might be more comfortable,

and we forget to mention

it to friends on the phone,

because, perhaps, bombs are not so unexpected

to us any more, and it takes real blood,

real, smoking craters in the earth and death tolls

on the nightly news to crack our jaded shell,

and little enough sense of violation when we are

blown up in only minor and inept ways,

after all, for we have seen worse than this,

and expect worse, and know that the world

is not nice, or kind, or forgiving,

though some of us have still gotten lucky sometimes,

and remained more or less

whole