The Communists were going to drop bombs on us;
that was not a matter of debate, only of timing.
I wondered why no one talked much about those bombs
we had dropped, or about the children who had been seen
fleeing that awful light
and how they were nothing now
but ghostly forms
on the walls of Hiroshima. 

But I knew better than to bring that up. 

Instead, I would sit quietly and Mama would read aloud,
again, the Official Rules and Regulations for a Bomb Shelter;
it sounded a lot like something Mama would have written;
she was good at rules and at getting ready
for disasters; and so we fixed up the cellar
under the house, dark and cold,
and we filled it up with Spam and white beans and
slimy canned spinach.

There would be room for only the three of us,
Mama said; all the poor cats and Bootsy,
our shaggy pet collie, and, of course, the neighbors
would have to fend for themselves
against the inevitable.

It did not seem like a kind of life I wanted to live; and so
as Mama read and talked and went about her preparations,
I would go over in my mind
my own simple plan:

When the sirens blared and the bombs were on the way,
I was going to run next door,
grab Mrs. Jessie Polson by the hand,
and together we would run as fast as we could
straight toward that light—