SECTION III, REGIONAL AIRPORT

The poems in this section are set in two places. The first is my childhood home, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, inhabited by scientists from across the U.S. and Europe, along with engineers, government officials, and others who formed the Manhattan Project and its post-war research labs. Nicknamed “Atom City,” this was a new, hastily built town — cosmopolitan, sciency, and focused firmly on the future. The second place is Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home to storytelling relatives who were schoolteachers, farmers, lawyers, writers, musicians, deacons, and postmasters. Theirs was a world of abiding connection to place, history, family, learning, and
nature. They also followed the imperatives of their faith, and, like the modernists in Oak Ridge, found ways to advance civil rights, at a time when that was far from the norm for white Southerners. These poems are written in gratitude for both these worlds, my earliest experiences of home. 

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