September 12

Everything is quieter today –
no rumble of planes overhead,
no peals of laughter on the ground.
People walk with the face of shock,
a thin veneer over simmering rage.
Our minds rewind, replay
over and over and over
the bad disaster film
too real to be true:
the airliner slicing the building like a knife,
the fireball, the towers crumbling to dust.
We hear of heroes – firefighters,
covered in ash, exhausted,
collapsing, getting a drink or whiff of oxygen,
and going back in,
looking for survivors, looking for their brothers.
Doctors, nurses, EMT’s, some breaking down
when it gets too much to bear.
Office workers, some of whom risked their lives
to save others.
Under the smoldering heap are thousands,
maybe some, miraculously, still alive.
The numbers are unthinkable,
outside a war.
We won’t know for days.
But what we do know
is when the towers came down,
our naïve arrogance came with them.
Never again will we say,
“It can’t happen here.”

09/21/2001

Posted on 09/21/2001
Copyright © 2024 Bruce W Niedt