story387.xml

story387.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-04-12

This is a poem I wrote on the afternoon of 911, when I biked out onto the Trump pier in Riverside Park and looked downriver and noticed the skyline empty of the towers. Even I had looked at the TV images all morning, standing there on the pier was the first time it really hit me that something very precious and part of me had been yanked from my life. Standing there, my eyes sort of filled with tears and I biked back home on 103rd and West End and wrote the following... (I've put slashes in to indicate the end of lines in case the format breaks up in transmission).

Jerry Mazza.

911

I look to the sky and they're gone, the Twin/
Trade Towers, as if two teeth were yanked/
with pliers of fire from the mouth/
of brassy New York, no novocaine/
or laughing gas to ease the pain,/
just the arms of happenstance to hold you/
from banging your head against the pavement,/
hearing the screams of thousands in the wind/
falling like angels from steel and glass,/
buried like mibcrobes in the tartar,/
leaving the scent of burning souls/
one hundred blocks away, this Tuesday,/
9/11, no Friday the 13th/
to match the terror of this nightmare,/
silent crowds along the pier,/
runners and walkers, cyclers, bladers,/
America's children grown up fast,/
an aching, a bleeding from the gap/
where ashes and smoke cover the gone,/
while summer lingers in the trees/
and life goes on in Riverside Park,/
across the river assassins posing/
as neighbors, cheering from a rooftop,/
rendered null, void and Godforsaken/
in the thousand names of the nameless beyond./