PROPAGANDA FILM

A house with a family of storefront dummies
Posing in a living room of black and white,
Two miles from ground zero; the boy my age.
I had the same cowboy shirt, the same goo hairdo;
Then the white flash of the bomb and pfff...
All pulverized into shadow. Blackness.

Did those bastards not hear my silent screams,
Cramped and dirty under the school room desk?

For fifty years it has brutalized my dreams-
I isolate on the monitor to one single frame,
A ghostly smoke of anesthesia blurred with light,
That spec of an instant when my existence split,
Like the atom, and turned me into dark matter.

About This Poem

Last Few Words: Some of us older from USA will remember these short films that were shown constantly in the 50's, of A-bomb tests in the desert. There are over 6500 of them. Here's one link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgpo0qAfwDk In many of these films JC Penny mannequins were used in makeshift towns called "doom towns" to test how they would survive the bomb. We were shown these films, which showed the families going ...pfff.. Then we were asked to go under our desks as drill. Not too comforting...

Editing Stage: Editing - rough draft

About the Author

Country/Region: Washington DC

Favorite Poets: D.Thomas

Comments

A different style

This seems different to many of your other poems.
It's very direct and quite hard hitting.
Actually, horrific really.
Glad you put the information at the bottom. I wouldn't have known otherwise.
Jx

I still have my dog tags,

I still have my dog tags, mandated by New York City for all school children, embossed with my father's name and our address....I was five years old. They are almost identical to military tags and worn on a chain around the neck. The red scare was scary!

solid piece of meaningful poetry