On a recent balmy day a noise came to us from the heavens, maddening, cleaving the air.

Not the roar of a jet dropping its payload, exploding the trees and sending us streaming from our house and down around to the crawl-space entrance to cower behind the walls while more bombs hit.

Not the BRRRRRTs of a machine gun poking from another plane’s belly, accomplishing the above plus strafing the chickens and obliterating our sandpile.

Not sonic booms.

Not even the whine of an oncoming drone. It whistling straight in beneath our porch eaves and through a window unpatched with tape to prevent shards of glass spraying. So that bedlam, also—needle slivers piercing the grandboy’s rising bread and ripping up the grandgirl’s pictures, and bloodying my hands still tight on our read-aloud book, and extinguishing the pages, too, or actually our lives.

In fact the whump whump whumps of a thunderous helicopter bird, a skinny pole dangling (100 feet in length, was my husband’s guess), and at the end of the pole, 10 spinning steel blades for slicing off any treetops that might interfere with the electric company’s lines. SVEC hadn’t notified the neighborhood. (Un)Like for the Gazans and Israelis (and, my lord, all the wailing rest), destruction simply fell from above.

But who deserves balmy, anyway? Just a breeze, the trees’ twiggy ends and tender leaves only swaying? Who says we get immunity? What justifies this rage, this shaking of our fists at our blue blue sky?