[from July]
Last night, in the distance, the pops and toothy whistles of rockets, booms of bombs, and strings of firecrackers rattling like rocks in a can. This morning, taking a walk at the lake, the revelers gone, the parking lot littered with flattened, dewy silence, red and gray, the hollow tubes, the burned-out cones, and all the duds, their fuses hissing right up to the edge of a bang that never arrived. All gone silent now, the sighs, the expectations, irritations and regrets, only the chirr of hundreds of swallows darting and diving, picking the last bits of smoke from the air.
---Ted Kooser
---found in The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book (2014)