The Drill Team

In humid summer heat
we drive across Tennessee,
our three young children
scrunched in the back seat of
our red station wagon.
We stop for gas at the Shop-n-Save,
beyond the billboard that reads:
Prepare To Meet Thy God.

Crowds spill into the
Sandy Springs high school stadium,
as if they are on a pilgrimage.
We hurry to sit on
hard wooden bleachers, too.
The Drill Team marches in:
twenty-six adolescent girls
in short white skirts and blouses,
with long tanned legs,
faces scrubbed and beaming.
They lift the American flag.
Everyone rises to sing:
Oh, say can you see,
by the dawn’s early light.
Every right hand rests on a heart.
Then the Raiders burst through
a wide white banner.
A blur of blue and orange uniforms
scatters on the grassy field.
The crowd shouts and claps.
The football slices the air, like a rocket.
We devour corn dogs and soda,
slip on sweaters in cooler night air.
The scoreboard glimmers like a second sky,
shimmering with stars.
At half-time, the Drill Team assembles.
A full moon casts a halo above them.

They are young Ziegfield girls,
leaping, twirling, chanting.
The captain tosses a fiery baton.
Grown-ups clap with awe,
children stand and cheer.
They love the pure white uniforms,
bright flames and sparkling batons,
the whirling girls like penitents,
all twenty-six heads of hair
gleaming with joy, and golden.

Published in And Then, Volume 18, 2015