Black Lightning

By Bob McAfee

You are the embodiment of a good thing coming in a small 
package, barely five feet tall and, let’s admit it, feisty as a 
sharecropper’s daughter ought to be.

You carry a chip on your shoulder and the knowledge of 
space-time travel in your mind, three degrees in six years 
from MIT, a thousand miles and memories away from

Clinton, Georgia, and here you are in space country like the 
Yoruban god, Shango, clenching the lightning bolts in your 
eager, steely fists; if only they had a

colored bathroom in your building; gods should not have to 
walk a mile to pee. They are already suspicious of your power 
even though they are envious of your work ethic.

Wondering where you go from here – you must be smart and 
retain your moral compass. Your boss tells you not to be a
 smart ass, but you have melded with the IBM 7094

computer which occupies half of the ground floor and is 
completely color blind. Tomorrow night, on a secret cue, the 
cosmos will begin to turn in your direction.

By using a mathematical series, we are able to integrate any 
function with FORTRAN on the computer with all calculation 
being performed in milliseconds.

Expanding in all directions, big-banging your universe until 
all the gears in your head have meshed into photons of light, 
you and Shango will create the code

to wrangle a rocket, break and saddle it, lead it around the O-ring 
until it obeys only your whistled commands, even though 
sometimes grabbing the bit in its teeth. 

You name your horse Saturn Five and he will carry three men 
to the moon, return them safely to earth, and finally, after 
many years of service, be sent out to stud in a pasture 


near Huntsville, Alabama. Eventually you and Shango loosen 
your grips on the thunderbolts. Your contributions will 
gradually sink into the memories of the company 

collective as you retire to the relative obscurity of 
Lake-of-the-Woods, Florida, located somewhere between the horse 
country of Ocala and the mouse country of Orlando.

Bob McAfee is a retired software consultant who lives with his wife near Boston. He has written nine books of poetry, mostly on Love, Aging, and the Natural World. For the last several years he has hosted a Wednesday night Zoom poetry workshop. Since 2019, he has had 136 poems selected by 54 different publications. Two poems Nominated for Best of the Net. His website, www.bobmcafee.com, contains links to all his published poetry.