STANZA ONE
At the precise moment that the clock turns 5:00 PM, a boy begins screaming. The pitch is high to the point of shrillness and features a curiously metallic element. His sister starts screaming as soon as the boy stops and this pattern continues, interrupted only by infrequent and irregular occasions when both boy and girl scream together. The speaker (identity unknown) gives thought to putting on shoes and rushing upstairs to check on them, hypothesizing that perhaps they are conducting some sort of experiment orchestrated by their parents to see if the kids possess the power to break crystals.
STANZA TWO
The speaker begins to consider other possibilities. Perhaps their mother is perversely proud of the lungs that she and the father of the children produced. Imagination takes over as the speaker considers whether their screaming could possibly reach such a decibel level that the entire apartment building will suddenly take off a rocket, carrying the inhabitants to the heavens like the biblical figure of Elijah riding a chariot of fire. Suddenly, the speaker pivots, and instead of simply imagining this is what the screams calling almost reach the point of accepting it and then desiring it. If this is what is going to happen, then let it happen. The theorizing turns to fantasizing: let the colors of the sky change from blue to red to gold to the blackness of infinity. Heaven will be waiting.
STANZA THREE
Potentialities for heaven are then considered. If it turns out for the dead to inhabit that hasn’t changed since the imagination of those who wrote the Old Testament, then so be it. If it turns out to be a door opening into an endless void of space, so be it. If it turns out to be a hellish inferno, that’s okay, too. The speaker allows a peek inside the psyche considering these possibilities: they are the thoughts of a person ready to cast aside all illusions of the permanence of possessions. What is given with the promise of a blessing inevitably becomes something taken away and fills us with grief over the loss. Heaven is personified into a wizard and a thief and then transformed into a sentient wind seeking to bring the dirtiness of existence back to a pristine state.
STANZA FOUR
The speaker considers the sound of the music being played on a speaker and the thwacking sound of a neighbor chopping onions next door dulled by the interference of walls. What seems to be an annoying racket to us is compromised into cosmically ludicrous triviality that is no more than a hiccup echoing against the immense vastness of the unknown that awaits us after death. Or, quite possibly, does not await us. The speaker is ripped back to the present with the sound of the kids still screaming, sounding like the apes in the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey voicelessly crying out in a primal scream of frustration and wonder at the sudden appearance of the monolith.
