tp23.xml

tp23.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-02-24

AFTER THE TOWERS MELTED


It may have been blasphemous, even cruel,
but someone wrote poetry after The Great Plague.
Others wrote in the midst of it, dying.
It was written in the trenches in France.
Scott wrote it at the South Pole.
During the Chicago Fire, The Blitz,
somewhere in the cellars of Dresden,
on the tilted deck of the Titanic,
someone scribbled a last thought,
held tight to a burning image.
As we do, the two nameless strangers
leaping eighty floors hand in hand.
Hiroshima did not escape this blight
of perception, nor did Rwanda.
The ovens at Birkenau were rank with it.
Everywhere great suffering reaches into our lives,
poetry arrives. With its wan smile
and rumpled clothes, its useless gestures.
Which it knows to be useless.
Like a drooling old grandmother,
like a crow in the middle of the road,
it tells us what we already know.
Nothing surpasses the afternoon.
Or the wind urging these clumsy branches
toward the future, wherever that is.