A family sits in a car while masked attackers surround it, shouting at them to get out. The speaker, apparently a child in the back or passenger seat, thinks the object pointed at them is a gun, and ducks down beside Mom. Each person reacts differently: Mom leans on the horn, Dad calmly studies the attackers' car, plates and clothes while telling her to back up, and the speaker simply hides and waits.
The poem's mood is tense but oddly matter-of-fact. The repeated questions, "How long the horn? How long the Get out!", stretch a few moments into something that feels endless, as if memory refuses to let the scene end. Then it ends abruptly: the attackers leave, and the driver turns out to be only fourteen. The last line, Dad's "I'd've run them over," lands as a shock. After the fear, it hints at how differently the speaker and Dad see the event, and the title's "Nothing Really Happened" sounds like a claim the poem doesn't quite believe.