The Burning Truck

It began at dawn with fighter planes: they came in off the sea and didn’t rise, they leaped the sandbar one and one and one coming so fast the crockery they shook down from off my shelves was spinning in the air when they were gone. They came in off the sea and drew a wave of lagging cannon-shells across our roofs. Windows spat glass, a truck took sudden fire, out leaped the driver, but the truck ran on, growing enormous, shambling by our street-doors, coming and coming. By every right in town, by every average we knew of in the world, it had to stop, fetch up against a building, fall to rubble from pure force of burning, for its whole body and substance were consumed with heat but it would not stop. And all of us who knew our place and prayers clutched our verandah-rails and window-sills, begging that truck between our teeth to halt, keep going, vanish, strike … but set us free. And then we saw the wild boys of the street go running after it. And as they followed, cheering, on it crept, windshield melting now, canopy-frame a cage torn by gorillas of flame, and it kept on over the tramlines, past the church, on past the last lit windows, and then out of the world with its disciples.