The lingering Christian
In my soul tells me
I should not be reveling so
In the violent death of
Another human being

But if that is true, God
Should not have made
Me a New Yorker.

Nor should He have put me
On the downtown streets
On a brilliant blue morning
In September where I could watch
The towers burn.

Where I would turn heavensward,
My eyes squinting in the sun,
To watch the small black shadows
Of the sparrow-people as they tried
To fly from aeries of burning stone
And melting steel

Or see the clay encrusted faces of firefighters
As they marched grimly to a fate
No one doing God’s work should ever endure

And later, touching bed sheets
On a clothesline, feeling the grit beneath my fingertips
Or taking a deep breath in the late summer
Morning, know I was breathing in
The dust of blood and bone

If I am supposed to remember Donne
Right now, and believe the death of
One man diminishes me, then I must
Also remember the thousands who
Died that day, and recall how their diminishment
Turned my heart as hard as steel.

*

And now I am told by some
We somehow lost our moral compass;
That we murdered an unarmed man
At home with his wife and children;
That he was doing nothing more benign
Than reading the evening paper
And watching American Idol
When the SEALS dropped in

I heard the same thing about Hitler
And Stalin and Mao-Tse Tung
How one loved dogs and another little children
And the third poetry.
Himmler loved opera and Goering
Was an art connoisseur
And collectively, with all
Their humane and ethical and eclectic tastes
They killed a hundred million souls

Sigh. I do not glorify murder
Even in my country’s name
I just know what history has taught us
Again and again.
Sometimes evil takes a great and violent force
To be subdued. Sometimes, I am sure,
God uses his creations on earth to
Dispatch evil to its just reward.

No, I did not cheer in jubilation
Or chant my country’s name
And I am not so sanguine
As to believe I live in a Holy Land
Whose agents are all angels in disguise.

And yes, I hear
The voices of those who
Anguish over state-sponsored anything
I admire them actually;
They remain the Conscience of
Us all, the people we secretly long to be,
The nation we pray is at the core
Of everyone who calls themselves Americans

Yet, and still…
I suppose the memories are still too vivid for me
To forget that easily.
The church down the street
Still is haunted with the flags and caskets
Of firefighters whose graves
Contained nothing more than a thumb
Or an eye; the tears of their widows still
Stain the sidewalks in my soul.

Like I said, if God wanted my stomach to
Twist in moral indignation
Over the death of a fiend
He should have moved my pregnant
Mother to New Mexico.

05/06/2011

Author's Note: Black, sardonic, angry, anguished...yes, this offering ( I am not sure it is a poem) is all that. And not what I want to write or felt happy writing. I agonized over every line, and some lines, every word. But in the end I put it out there because it said what I wanted to say and it helped me do what most of my poems were designed to do before they were ever conceived...they helped me understand me. But do not despair: gentle, sensient,tender, and yes, ironic poetry is on the way.

Posted on 05/06/2011
Copyright © 2025 Ken Harnisch