Nuclear Winter

Edward Nobles

When the sky fell, the earth turned blue.
The trees, the tenements, the cars and buses
soaked up the sky and changed from outside in, in color,
to blue. The children ran frantically in adult directions. My wife,
dressed fashionably in blue, took my hand and, with sadness
in her deep blue eyes, led me behind the house, down the long incline, and into
the woods. We waded in blue snow through blue trees.
An iridescent crow, blue, flew from a branch, and a fox
lay in our tracks, oblivious to our passing. He licked his blue fur
with melancholic eyes. The years pass very quickly with this earth.
In that time, we had two children, the son and daughter
we always dreamt of, and they knelt above us, like two granite stones,
ghostly figures praying, for the love of God, for what he had become:
a family moved by that one clear color, blue, beneath the blue snow.