The First Thing I Ever Learned to Draw Was a Bomb

by Ra Avis

 

My father didn't know what a bomb was
'till there was shrapnel in his back.

At a pop-up French hospital,
he learned what a bomb could be,
learned what a bomb could take.
A nurse drew a cartoon missile,
three little lines behind it to show it falling from the sky.
She drew a stick figure boy underneath.

He learned then what a bomb could look like.

In the earliest picture I have of my father,
it is a year or so later, and
he is sitting on a grounded missile in Laos,
small boy legs dangling off an unexploded ordnance.
Small boys running and jumping,
playing hide-n-seek around debris.

One time, he said, Komal hid in a hole and found a body part.
One time, Savan jumped on a device
and they learned it only hadn't exploded
yet.

That second time, but not the last,
as they pulled blast from his back,
my father taught all the other boys
how to draw a missile.

Decades later, he taught me too.
We drew the body, and the three lines,
and then a long line across the paper
to show where Heaven forgets Earth.
He showed me how to draw the child on the ground,
arms up in the air,
stick figure hands spread wide, disproportional, 
larger than the missile.

Exactly as he remembered.
Hands bigger than bombs.

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