The missing father

My father, Donald Rauber, was for a time in the late 1950s/very early '60s, a technical writer at Sandia, which worked on nuclear weapons. He later was a brilliant scholar & writer; he died in 1971.

I was six, maybe seven

when he told us stories in a front yard carved from the New Mexico desert,

Trinity’s dust still drifting in the wind.

When we dream of falling, he said, his voice quiet in the evening softness,

we recall—in blood or cells or synapses—

when early humans lived aloft and feared falling from tall trees.

The dust from Trinity surrounded us even then,

in a new neighborhood carved from the desert,

where tractors rested at night before resuming their toil.

He told us about space, imagined beings in other worlds,

distant planets, far galaxies,

places and possibilities that fired a young boy’s dreams.

I remember clouds of butterflies, now more rare,

dancing in the wind and landing nearby,

and once, at least, an invasion of long green caterpillars,

Covering sidewalks and driveways, seeming out of place

in a new neighborhood bereft of trees except mere twig-like

apparitions, dripping now with green.

The ghosts of Trinity still walked the land.

I am become Death, the destroyer, Oppenheimer said that day and place,

a two-hour drive from our new driveway.

My father was a cog in that death machine,

a writer of technical documents. He visited other sites, after other

detonations, to help document the unthinkable.

When he was away, my family and I would wait impatiently

for his return, the missing father,

while Trinity’s dust and Trinity’s ghosts rode the wind around us.