David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Always Watching: A Cold War Memory (poem)

My father’s fear smelled like rancid sweat
as he whispered to mom about a fireball and Cuban
missiles.  At school we practiced duck and cover,
cowering beneath battered wooden desks
built with inkwells from a time when pens were dipped.
Hands holding a bent head, my heart beat between the ears.

Nike was watching, always ready, computers
and radar scanning the sky, missiles primed
against Soviet bombers.  Soldiers hunkered down
in bunkers were wired on coffee, fully alive
on adrenalin, and waiting for the ultimate.

With warheads long gone, kids now play at Nike
Park, wearing shoes with a trademark swoosh.
They run around ball fields, sprinkling the air
with laughter and shouts in a spot where radar towers
once stood guard and waited.  A low, boxy block building
where uniformed men used to bend over panels of lights
and buttons is decorated with a bright mural depicting
smiling children, blue sky, an arcing rainbow and lush,
deep green trees.  Nike Tykes is a safe and supportive preschool,
where children can be independent, curious and creative.
The sirens are silent, for now.

Finding Weedy Jewels

Money may not grow on trees, but a short walk from home thousands of jewels are hanging among leaves.  Since mid-summer, lush stands of jewelweed have been blooming along the Farmington River,  beside small streams, in ditches and swales and other moist, shady spots.  Perhaps no plant so widespread combines such beautifully intricate flowers, unusual means of seed dispersal, intriguing lore, and modern usefulness.  Jewelweed proves there is magic and mystery in some of the most ordinary things around us.

The Loneliest Diner

Is there any structure more sorry and lonely than an abandoned diner?  If you don’t think that one of these once gleaming stainless roadside eateries can evoke such emotions after they’ve been left  to molder, then you haven’t been to the corner of James and Humphrey Streets in New Haven, Connecticut where the uprooted Forbes Diner, built in 1957, sadly sits in pieces on a vacant lot half hidden in weeds and brush, a wreck that looks like a ship washed ashore in a rough storm.