It’s
here again. And with it all of the gut
wrenching memories. I dread it every
year. But it will not leave me or, I
suspect, any of us alone.
But
as horrible as those images etched indelibly in my mind are, is it wrong to say
that I miss the days just after? Remember?
For a little while Americans loved
each other, found comfort in each other’s arms.
Divisions melted. We were united
by grief, and yes, even some righteous anger.
Even the world mourned for
us. Some of us even dared hope that the
sense of oneness, community, and solidarity could change us. Maybe even last.
Of
course it didn’t weeks went by and we went charging off in different directions—drumming
up wars on people who had nothing to do with the attack, cooking up wild conspiracy theories that confirmed our
own personal demons and loathing’s, scapegoating
the convenient and the weak, attacking the patriotism of anyone who did not wear a flag pin 24 hours a day.
And
now, multiple wars later, a Depression, the
election of a Black President, the
ascent of a kind of political madness, and
the rise of entitled oligarchy,
Americans hate each other. Really
hate. Can’t stand to talk with each
other, be in the same room, breath the same air. Rage is the order of the day. White
men strut through malls and fast food emporiums with military style
weapons slung over their shoulder daring anyone to look cross eyed at them and
in their heart of hearts hoping that someone will challenge them. Looking for any spark to set off a Civil War.
Black kids who look like
they could be trouble are pumped full of holes with monotonous regularity just
because. Busses of half-starved immigrant children are besieged by
snarling mobs. In some churches, mosques, and temples hate thy neighbor is the daily
message. We are sliced and dice apart
every which way—by race, language, religion, politics, age, gender, and who we
choose to love.
The
once revered first responder heroes of
9/11 have been transformed into greedy union thugs by politicians. Police departments have been transformed
from serve and protect into little
armies to quash the slightest suggestion of unrest or dissent.
And
then to top it off, last night the President—my
President, the one who I worked to get in office and in whom I have invested so
many hopes—presented the country with a brand new shiny war against a new phantom and hoping against hope to
enlist allies who will not turn out to be just as disastrous the boogey men we are fighting.
So
much for my rant.
Looking
back, I have grappled with 9/11 in my poetry more than almost any other
subject. And how that poetry evolved
speaks to what has happened to us.
This
one was written for a one year anniversary program and included in my
collection We Build Temples in the Heart.
The Dead of 9/11 Leave a Message on George
W’s Voice Mail
The Dead cry out—
It is not lonely here!
They
come by the scores
and
by the thousands
every
day,
as
they have always come,
each
arrival here
a
wrenching loss below.
They
come as they have always come,
each
death the completion of a journey,
the
closing of a hoop of life.
And we
welcome each of them.
But we are not lonely here.
We do
not wander silent corridors
our
footsteps echoing,
yearning
for a voice.
We are
not lonely
for
we are the Dead
and
we are everywhere
united
in that last breath
and
in eternity.
But You—
You make haste to fill the unfillable,
to send
us more,
many
more,
out of
their own time
as we
were out of ours,
yanked
here in violence and hatred.
Let them be.
They will come in their own time.
We who know death
do not
cry out for revenge.
We are not lonely here.
In 2007 came one
of those serendipitous coming together of calendar occasions
September 12, 2007
The Day After 9/11—Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah
Wheels
turning within wheels—
an astrolabe,
Tycho’s observatory,
gears in some fantastic machine,
electrons—atoms—molecules,
moons—planets—stars—galaxies—universes.
Today,
just today—
Point A on Wheel X, spinning urgently,
comes to kiss Point B on Wheel Y,
rotating on its own good time,
for just a nano-second
having just brushed by
Point C on cog Z.
These
precise events will come again,
I suppose—
you do the math if you wish.
But
if I wore stars on a pointed hat,
I might conclude that there was something
beyond mere physics at work here.
Call
it an omen, if you wish,
or the flat hand of something Greater
slapping us up side our
merely mortal heads
and scolding us—
“Spin as you will,
you spin not alone.”
On the tenth anniversary I was moved by
reading that the dust from the Twin Towers
was still orbiting the stratosphere and
slowly, year by year, falling to earth.
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust
September 9, 2011, Crystal Lake, Illinois
The ash and dust, they say,
rose as high as the skirts
of the ionosphere.
Prevailing winds pushed it
across
oceans and around the world.
Most has sifted by now to the earth.
Some orbits still,
motes descending
now
and again.
My study is a cluttered mess.
Dust lays on any unattended
horizontal surface,
makes webs in corners,
balls in computer wire rats nests,
devils under bookshelves.
That speck, that one there,
the
one by the stapler,
just
might be what’s left
of
the Dominican cleaner
who
left her children
with
their Abuela
and
went to work
in
the sky
only
to be vaporized.
Hola, señora.
It is an honor to meet you.
Last year I
recalled that 9/11 was etched in the memories of Chileans as the date of their own national catastrophe—the 1973 coup d’état
that overthrew the democratically
elected government of Salvador
Allende and ushered in a brutal dictatorship. The United
States government was more than just complicit in that.
Two Anniversaries
September 11, 2013
I’ll ante my 3,000 vaporized on a crystal morning.
You’ll see me your 3,000 homeless ghosts.
I’ll give you my crumbling Towers and billowing ash.
You will call with the bombed rubble of La Moneda .
I’ll throw in a stack of terrorists with beards and turbans.
You’ll count out freckled faces, crew cuts, and black
fedoras.
Let’s show our cards and see who loses.
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