last assignment

The last in class assignment I gave my class was to write a dramatic monologue, possibly from the pov of a person in a famous or classic photograph. I offered up several, including a portrait by Annie Leibowitz, one of Sally Mann's children (a girl of maybe 8 smoking a cigarette), one of Arbus' characters, such as the twins or the child with the hand grenade, or a person from one of Winograd's 60s portraits, such as the woman with 2 rhinos, the inter-racial couple with chimps, etc. I put them up on the overhead and also on Blackboard. Most of the students have their own laptops, so they could look at each a while.
I wrote one too. Here it is:
Child with a Hand grenade, After A Photograph by Diane Arbus

Everyone was thinking of the bomb.
In Central Park, beneath a half dead tree,
I played at soldier with my hand grenade,
a tiny plastic pineapple, about to blow.
At school, they taught us all to duck and cover.
We’d hunker under desks like toads, our skinny
thighs around our ears, waiting for the world
to end. And then what? No one ever said.
Would we emerge like locusts, blinded by the glare
of bursting suns, to be the only things alive?
Some game. No wonder in the picture
I grimace and stare off into the distance,
where vague and faceless strangers stalk the path.