It’s a DDT bomb. Bulbous and blue.
With a nozzle. Marketed to pretty mothers.
She lets us knead yellow-dye capsules
into the white oleo.
She’s a modern woman. She sprays
DDT on our winter clothes
before she puts them away for summer.
She makes junket for our dessert.
She lets us spray DDT on our mittens
She irons sheets on a mangle.
The war is over. The war is not over.
The DDT bomb stands up straight
like a soldier without lice. Symbol
of dead arthropods, living tumors.
And the tumor becomes its own symbol
of destructive things.
War is over. We are at war.
Our neighborhood trees are sprayed
from big trucks. We play in the spray.
We jump-rope in the tree-lined street.
DDT is a blue bomb with a nozzle.
There are big shoulder-pads
in her pink crêpe blouse. She wears
two tortoise-shell combs in her hair.
Our smocked cotton dresses
are crispy-ironed. Our cardigans,
our mittens will not be moth-eaten.
There’s DDT on our apples.
The war is over. Her breast will be gone.
The war is not over.
Tumors will ravage her marrow.
Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry with a sixth, The Eyes Have It, to appear in 2018. Her poetry, essays, and reviews are published at home and abroad, in print and online. An excerpt from her fourth and most recent chapbook, The Last Gun, won the 2016 COG Poetry Award and was subsequently animated. Harding Woodworth is co-chair of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.