Breakfast poem

Breakfast one morning

Breakfast was always ready
Egg, soft boiled perched in the china eggcup
Waiting to be whacked wide open by the butter knife
Toast and grapefruit sliced, buttered and sugared.
Nine-year-old hands reach across the oak table for the butter knife
Nine-year-old eyes glance toward Mother

It was 1969 but Mother wore post WWII fashion alla 1950
She was the essence of advertised modern perfection
She owned her place by imminent domain
She owned her appliance filled white middle class world
She owned her color TV
The TV held court next to the butter on the kitchen counter
Breakfast news served up red white and blue coffins
Good soldiers lined up, bagged and flagged
Mother had two sons in the Marines

Nine-year-old logic.
“Mom? Why would they fight us? With God on our side they must know they can’t possibly win.”
Another draped coffin is carried across the TV screen
Dragging Mothers well-kept 1950 modernity with it.
Nine-year-old hands take hold of the knife
“Mom? They must believe that God is on their side.”
The knife whacks the egg
Yoke bleeds broken yellow dripping down the side of the eggcup
Another coffin enters the screen
Flag rippling across the casket
It flutters and saturating ooze leaches into Mothers white middle class world.
An unkempt postmodern confusion she can no longer keep at bay
“Mom? Whose side is God on?”