9/11

“The horror! The horror!”

The angel of death had silver wings
and soulless eyes to count the dead:
Two thousand, nine hundred and seventy-seven.
The circle of destruction was sixteen blocks,
Three eviscerated countries and countless dead.
How to dissolve revenge in its own bile
And rescue humanity from a warlocked world?

Hell opened its gates to nineteen new disciples
Plummeting to the deepest, darkest depths
To join their brethren, traitors to humanity
Whose altar drips with the innocent blood of life -
Human sacrifice to a perverted god.
There is no sacred in their religion,
Only the slit throats of non-believers.

There is no beginning. There is no end.
Only “in medias res” where we all live
And die in the vortex of our own history,
Trapped in the harsh linearity of time
Where cause and effect rip our world apart
Just like with the topless towers of Ilium
Brought down by the unseen enemy infiltrating
Its golden gates. But this is not a poem
To be recounted in future years of the lineage
Of warriors and their brave deeds, of their birth
And death, of their victories and defeats,
Of heroes and villains whose history and mythology
Merged into a way of life as real
To their world as ours is to us, but our gods
Are not so easily defined, having eluded
Our understanding with each new iteration
Of belief hardening into an attitude
As inflexible as the grimace on a zealot’s face
Fighting for a supremacy
The world does not need or want.
I do not speak of war between nations
Or people, or religions, or beliefs
Or politics or any of the other
Man-made systems where malevolent will
Collides with innocent desire.
I am a solitary man among a multitude
Whose eyes burn from watching death
Descend from the heavens like a fallen angel
Incinerating the bodies of the living.
Could Lucifer, himself, with all his fiery
Hate and his all too human ways
Have been as evil
As men
Who worship in the temple of death.

This is a poem
Dedicated to the ordinary people
Who suffered an extraordinary death,
Seared into our collective consciousness –
One more mass grave to add to all the others
Beyond the reach of any requiem
To soothe souls in mourning.
Words work best when left unadorned
By rhetoric to speak with a clear voice,
Simply and directly,
To what people most want to hear - “why?”
To that end I surrender my voice to my heart
And set out on the same journey as you,
A fellow witness to an abomination
Who is ashamed to belong to a species
Who for over four thousand years
Since that first sad epic
Celebrates the myths we create out of our history
Where the dead are forgotten and the killers eulogized.
Now, all around us we have death,
On every continent and in every land.
Blood-stained hands hold high all religious standards.
As we stumble through eternity
With as much fear now as when
the mysteries of night first convulsed us.
But the darkness is always broken by the light.
Was this the first of our inherited
Myths: the revelation of light and dark,
Of good and evil, sin and redemption?
How do we reconcile our fear of the unknown
With our fear of others who are different
And our own lack of will
To dissolve our malignant beliefs
And stop keeping the unknown, unknown
And the different, different.

Who has not seen that dark pillar of smoke
And ash crumble over Lower Manhatten
Like a mushroom cloud collapsing under its own weight
Where hope lies buried with the dead.
The dark night of the soul endures.
This is not a world for the meek or tender hearted.
This is a world where death is celebrated,
Where cold-blooded murder ignites parties
In the streets exploding with an unbridled joy
And satisfaction at the sweet smell of revenge,
As if some primitive, pre-human instinct
For survival by annihilation
Is what is needed to save our world
And ourselves.
But four thousand years of history cannot lie,
And does not to those who see beyond the plagues
That have killed us to the passions
That give them life. Who has not seen
The body bags filled with the nameless dead
Emerging from a ghostly mist
Like the memory of some other holocaust
Whose victims also had names and lives,
Friends and families, hopes and dreams.
This is our world collapsing under the weight
Of its own inertia, its paralysis
Of will to alter the unalterable
Desires of lives lived on the edge
Of nightmares where far too many are at home,
Willing to welcome all into their world of death.

Krakatoa speaks to the living and the dead
From ten generations ago who once woke
To a quiet dawn of sun, blue sky and dreams,
Scattered like their lives across an ashen
Landscape: Hiroshima, Auschwitz, New York.
Kabul, Baghdad. Damasacus.
When nature spills over her limits
And claims even one of us
Our grief is immeasurable and real
And as deeply felt as any human, anywhere,
Our universal bond of humanity – severed.
How then can we sift through the ashes of history
To resurrect from the grief of ages
All those slain by a human hand,
Who never even knew their time had come,
And if they did, the shock of life’s denial
Must have been equal in its consequence
To the consequence itself. How easy to say,
“Turn the other cheek,” or “Thou shalt not kill,”
or “Love thy enemies.” We are not gods
even though we pretend to be. We cannot
easily forgive or forget the atrocities
we inflict on ourselves with our
crusades, our jihads, our holy wars
cutting down life like the Grim Reaper, whose ride
across the centuries has given satisfaction
to so many. How do we forgive?
How do we forget?
Can we? Will we?
How? Why?
When?
These are questions we cannot answer
Bur must if we are to survive.
The taking of a life is wrong
And those who disagree are infidels
Whether they are Christians, Muslims or Jews,
Or Sikhs, or Hindus or atheists.
All of us bear witness
To our souls sinking into a human hell.
And to those who have neither God nor conscience,
You are lost souls who will never find peace
Or joy in the world of the living
Which is where we all belong,
Each and every one of us,
To discover in our own lives
the meaning of why we are here
And how we will make a difference
In creating a world where differences
Are cause to celebrate not destroy.