Photography © Edward S. Gault

 

Dairy Queen Night

The streets were peaceful
Those summers I was growing up.
Tree branches arched over on both sides of the street,
Giving us the shelter of shade as we played our games.
Some times it was street hockey,
On other evenings it was baseball.
Saturday afternoons, we would re-enact the gunfight we had just seen on t.v.
With the kids on Sherwood Ave., the next block over.
Dad would take us to the Dairy Queen.
It was on street hockey night that Dad called us to the car.
Benny had just scored a goal for us,
      -the game was still close though.
Still, I wasn’t going to miss ice cream night.
But we weren’t going to finish the game.
We weren’t going to have ice cream.
This is when we saw the tanks at the end of the block.
We had heard what the tanks had done to other towns,
Now they had come to ours.
They started firing on our homes.
I could hear the bombs exploding downtown.
The next day nothing was left.
Not even the Dairy Queen.

 

Edward S. Gault is a poet and fine arts photographer living in Brighton, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Oddball Magazine, Spectrum, Wilderness House Literary Review, Interlude, Currents, and Encore.