Looking Up

LOOKING UP

Does the sky today
with its twelve cranes
neatly folded and calling
in gourd-throated rattles
look something like the sky
on that Friday I was born?

That day in 1944
our 386th bomber squadron
accidentally
hit a house in Belgium.

Was anyone home?
That’s important to know.
Were they aware
it was The Good War?
’cause that’s important to know.
And will folding a thousand cranes
really bring peace?
That’s important to know.

—Ralph Murre

first appeared in the Museletter of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets