There were no barking dogs that night, no passing cars with windows down 
	and country singers wailing how their lives had vanished down the drain 
	since that 'purty' woman went away. Everything was quiet. I was eleven, an 
	only child, safe in our tiny house, nestled in our gated town, Oak Ridge, 
	Tennessee. I loved softball and thought it nothing to hike all over town with 
	teammates to play our summer games. Mother said I slept the sleep of 
	hibernating bears; so it must have been the headlines that kept me near the 
	surface of that night, my bedroom window open, the moon skimming slowly 
	past the clouds, normal clouds, not the newsreel's towering mushroom clouds.  
	It must have been pure joy and excitement that wakened me: our town in the 
	news: we learned we'd made the stuff of "atom bombs." The war was over.  


		At seventy, I no longer sleep the winter sleep of bears. Earth wobbles 
	in its course, heavy with an infinity of dead children peering out at summer 
	nights from their secret places within us all. They cannot hide from those 
	omnivorous mushroom clouds, from rains of napalm and agent orange, from 
	shock and awe, ethnic cleansings, trails of tears, middle passages. Steel 
	towers melting high above Manhattan Island.  



				--- Julian Crowell
				
				My thanks to Passager for publishing the (then untitled) 
				prose poem "[August Nights: 1945 And 2004]" in their 
				"Pass It On" column in Issue 39, 2004.