September 11, 2001

A poem for what falls


The beast slouched,
and crouched and shat.

The believers carved their faith
into an enamelled sky
with 10000 blades,
razors in the throats and eyes
of an astonished people.

In the hearts of the uncertain,
uncertainty becomes a siren wail,
unbearable, and they ask to be lashed
to the mast of revenge.

Men and women
bet their own lives
on the odds that strangers
struggling in the instant ruin,
clenched by steel fingers, breathless, dead
in the long day of gravity and fire,
were not breathless or dead.

They define goodness
in the dim white
of their own bone dust
and the fading black
of their own blood, dust
in the powdered ground.

They define goodness
in their own
reassuring smiles
guiding the accidently damned
toward the safety
they would not allow themselves.

Tell their stories,
and remember their names.

In the sprawling tons
of failing steel and cement,
mere flesh was pinched of its life
and its wetness...
death dry before it hit the ground
for those inside.

Death silent and diving down
in a rag doll trance,
down like a flung cat
down like a baby slipped
from its mom's grasp
at the door of heaven,
slipped from the hot metal breast
of the astonished building.

Men and women prop up
the melting heart
with shards of rage.

But the heart melts,
and seeps into the ground,
where its red becomes
the black dust of tomorrow,
and then the wind.

The wind sweeps
the smell of terror
out to sea.

The brooms of the wind
sweep and sweep the stones clean again.

Carve the names
of the reckless saviors
into the stones.
Return the shards
out across the waters.
Fill the blue sky
with blackness
and fill the graves
of the good innocent
with the ashes.

Without songs,
and the names of the brave,
we are the dust
the wind will sweep.
We are the dust of our own forgetting.

Sing them praise,
and remember their names,
the reckless saviors
of the day of gravity and fire.