Bomb

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,
back to mundane tasks
until the call to 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 the gathering 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

AFTM