Missile Silo Nursery Rhyme
You never said the monsters were underground, not underneath my bed. Under the ground you led a group of solemn men who never bowed their heads but stared into God’s tiger lily eyes: tiger lily, calla lily: the stench of funerals & small lies. (My brother & I tried to sleep with the coyote-faced winds, the high plains howls of wandering souls murdered by gold-hungry men). When you said I love you more than you can know, I didn’t know you would authenticate the code to launch a bouquet of snapdragons & poisoned lead to those other children in their other beds. You said count tumbleweeds & mother’s kisses, tadpole eggs & birthday wishes, hold them like a blessing in your tiny hand. You never said, I hope you’ll understand when you wake up in a black hole serenade because I never questioned the commands of statisticians & politicians, our hymn-soaked souls in their fission-calloused hands. (My brother & I burrowed tunnels in the bunker of Montana snow, cheeks flushed as red & bright as atomic bursts in the Nevada night. He held my mittened hand when the structure collapsed, led me out of white darkness into the chamomile light). My rag doll said, my name is Tatters if it matters, did it matter what I said? When you cut my birthday cake & crowned it with whipped cream, handed me a ragged blanket to keep the monster from my dream, hid me in a hamper so I could never be found, took me to the junkyard to see what lay glistening on the ground. When you bandaged my scraped knee the moment it bled, carried me on your shoulders with dragonfly songs in my head. When you tucked me into the lilac blossoms of my garden bed, heard my daisy-blossom-yellow-tinted prayer, whispered sleep tight & kissed my head, you never, ever said that if you didn’t come home in the morning light, it meant that we were already dead.
“I began writing this poem about a year after my father died and I was wrestling with reconciling the man I knew (fun, kind, gentle, loving) with the fact that he was a missile launch officer from 1966-1968 (we were stationed at Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls, MT). I rarely write rhyming poems, but I chose this format to reflect the voice of a child because I was 3-5 years old during that time and was learning to read Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.” —Beth Gordon
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of five chapbooks, most recently The First Day (Belle Point Press); and one full length collection, This Small Machine of Prayer (Kelsay Books). Her second full-length collection, Alchemist or Arsonist, is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2027. Beth is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books. Instagram, Threads and BlueSky @bethgordonpoet.