Memorandum

RE: In Memoriam

I don’t want to hear

Where you were

Or what you remember about 9/11.

How the planes crashed, and the towers fell

And our world “changed forever.”

No.

(Nor how our fears rose,

And the big banks crashed

Or morality and culture sunk

Like a stone.)

I know all these things,

And more, because

You told me before.

Remember?

You were:

Working online or at school

That Tuesday morning

And listening to the radio,

To NPR or Howard Stern

Sweating in the shop or

Watching the Today show,

Folding laundry like any other day when

There was an impact

And then another, immediately followed

By conflagrations and death tolls,

By disbelief and misinformation.

The towers WOULD HOLD –

We were promised they would,

As the shock descended

And reports started leaking that

People in ties and skirts and

Kitchen whites and janitor’s uniforms began

Jumping (they were jumping!)

From shattered windows so high

They couldn’t possibly survive.

And it wasn’t possibly real.

(But media delayed showing us

The truth for hours upon hours.

Unlike today, ratings mattered less.)

Was it one plane? Was it two?

Who did this?

Who hates us?

Who hates America so much?

We’re the good guys… aren’t we?

What’s happened? And

HOW AM I AFFECTED?

That mattered most.

Because I will not be irrelevant

And omnipotent and impotent

At an historic time like this.

No.

Everyone in your office or classroom

Stopped working, almost stopped talking

Like it was Pearl Harbor & Zombies.

It was the end of the New World.

Long live the Old World.

But no one said that, not then.

At the time, you just knew that

You couldn’t think, you

Couldn’t breathe, you

Couldn’t live the same way again.

A manager quietly installed

A rogue TV in the lunchroom

Where everyone was usually discouraged

From gathering (it wasn’t “productive”)

But where everyone, bar none, gathered now,

Silently, almost by intuition,

Because they had nowhere else to go.

The disparate family you became then,

Never to forget those moments,

Bind you together to this day.

You still know them all, don’t you?

Your close friends, wan and ill-looking,

Hardly watching what unfolded on the small screen.

Those you didn’t know well

But could never forget from that day on.

The office reprobates, like the guy –

You know, that guy in the other department

Rumored for cheating on his wife –

Or the manager accused of stealing

But never proven guilty.

All of you beyond stupefied when

Dan Rather told us, in tones befitting his robot self,

That the top of the first tower fell

Because we couldn’t see it –

Did it happen? No, he’s wrong! –

Through the papers and dust clouds

And devil’s faced plumes

And the Horror.

To us, those majestic columns still

Looked just as high

Because of all the smoke. Then

Poof! Like a magician’s trick,

The first, then its twin, were gone.

David Copperfield couldn’t have done better.

We sat, dumbfounded and dumb,

No longer hearing the news

For long stretches of time before

Leaving our work with or without

Permission (irrelevant), and then

Walking home for miles across the bridge to

Our modest flat in Queens or

Driving home stupefied

Like a drunk after a funeral reception.

We couldn’t even call loved ones

Or even liked ones in New York

Or Philadelphia

Or Washington, D.C.

Or anywhere

Because our cell phones crashed for hours.

No getting through.

Who died? Who knew?

Initially, as we processed it,

We didn’t believe our eyes.

No.

After all, it was on TV

Like Matlock or Cops – not real.

Not real at all.

It would take a least a day for

The rubble and the Pennsylvania

Plane wreckage and the

Pentagon explosions

To shout the proof so loudly that

We couldn’t deny it.

It deafened us for years.

Someone shut down the skies

For three full days afterward

And the bluest September heavens you ever saw

Or ever would see

Were totally unmarred

By nary a jet wash or rocket launch.

It was the only beautiful thing

That buoyed our souls.

No.

I don’t want to hear

How America is No. 1.

We’re so conflicted,

And fallen by disunity, that

We haven’t even rebuilt what

“Terror” took down.

Not in all this time,

Even though the initial towers

Only took four years to construct

And less than four hours to destroy.

Measured by our response,

You could say terror won

In that we’re not the same America

We once were.

We’re fearful and frightening,

Schizoid and accusatory,

Failing and flailing

Our people and the world.

If you think otherwise,

Perhaps you weren’t really there that day.

Or you are still in denial.

I Was There.

A Sentinel for the Ages.

I Remember.

And I don’t want to hear

How you wish things were different

Today, 10 years after the fact

After America’s pride rose, then fell

Xenophobic and egotistical

Greedy and grasping

In its McCarthy-like postscript

Of hysterical Guantanamo madness.

Of wars half fought and heroes fallen.

(If you must grieve, grieve for them!)

Of complications and consternations

I’ve long since tired of following.

You thought you were scared

By 9/11 fully 10 years ago

And counting?

I’m more scared of 9/11 now.

But I don’t want to think about it.

Make no movies about it

(Nicholas Cage, this means you).

I still won’t go. It’s not entertainment and

It’s not the Hindenburg, after all;

36 people didn’t die in Lakehurst.

Oh, the humanity.

It was thousands – every one of those lives

Touching thousands

Upon thousands of thousands more

Impacted and burned up in their souls

And in their bodies, by grief, by illness,

By hopelessness.

Oh

Let it be over, already,

This need to remember the day.

It’s this nightmare rogue wave

With ripples a thousand times wider

And a thousand times deeper

And a thousand times higher

Than we can ever fathom.

As it rises against my will,

I ride it the best I can, and

I’d take you with me

For support and company

But it’s all I can do to

Stay afloat myself and

Keep my head up and

Strive with all my might

And my aching heart to remember

Each and every day

To love and to live

To breathe and to hope

To forge on and

Forget and Forget

And Forget

To

Forget

What can never be forgotten.