That Morning       They had named the battleships for states:        Arizona        Pennsylvania        West Virginia        Nevada        Oklahoma        Tennessee        California        Maryland       They called them "she"       as if they were women       (gray metal women),       and they were all there that morning       in what they called Battleship Row.       Their places       (the places of the gray metal women)       were called berths.        Arizona was at berth F-7.       On either side, her nurturing sisters:        Nevada       and Tennessee.       The sisters, wounded, survived.       But Arizona, her massive body sheared,       slipped down. She disappeared. Rainbows       It was an island of rainbows.       My mother said that color arced across the sky       on the spring day when I was born.       On the island of rainbows,       my bare feet slipping in sand,       I learned to walk.       And to talk:       My Hawaiian nursemaid       taught me her words, with their soft vowels:        humuhumunukunukuāpua`a       the name of a little fish!       It made me laugh, to say it.       We laughed together.        Ānuenue meant "rainbow."       Were there rainbows that morning?       I suppose there must have been:       bright colors, as the planes came in. Aloha       My grandmother visited.       She had come by train across the broad land       from her home in Wisconsin, and then by ship.       We met her and heaped wreaths       of plumeria around her neck.       " Aloha, " we said to her.        Welcome. Hello.       I called her Nonny.       She took me down by the ocean.       The sea moved in a blue-green rhythm, soft against the sand.       We played there, she and I, with a small shovel,       and laughed when the breeze caught my bonnet       and lifted it from my blond hair.       We played and giggled: calm, serene.       And there behind us--slow, unseen--        Arizona, great gray tomb,       moved, majestic, toward her doom. She Was There       We never saw the ship.       But she was there.       She was moving slowly       on the horizon, shrouded in the mist       that separated skies from seas       while we laughed, unknowing, in the breeze.       She carried more than       twelve hundred men       on deck, or working down below.       We didn't look up. We didn't know. Excerpted from On the Horizon by Lois Lowry All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.