patti's twin death poem

[M Fries <mfrourke772>]

twin death

9.11

awoke to the sound of a passenger plane singing its
end. awoke to the
sensation of spirits - a purgatory of souls ascending
the billowing smoke
and ash filling the sky at the base of my street.

they are gone. the twin posts that anchored our city.
an hour before
i waved goodbye to my daughter heading for school. i
sat on my stoop
gazing at them sleepily, disinterested, then returned
to my slumber,
in the arms of my love.

9.12

awoke to the sound of f-15's and  helicopters circling
above, drawing
me from bed into the street. the towers are gone and
the skin of our sky
is wounded.

they are gone. what form of intelligence has committed
this deed?
what portrait could i paint? what lines might i draw?
from what human
memory can i draw from? i can no longer picture them.
on my wall are
sheets of drawings, abstracting the cross and the
motion of resurrection.
i remove them and set them away, taping up fresh
sheets, returning to the
street to think.

yellow streamers  snake through the streets, wrapping
my ankles. as i reach
to free myself, i notice the light if different. they
way it falls on 
the buildings
and on the back of my hand. momentarily inspired, i
pocket some streamers
and head back.

taping the yellow strip across the white sheets of
paper, i find i am unable
to draw one line. it should be so simple, child's play
to trace their dual
silhouette. but i can't. i'm afraid that i won't do it
right. i'm afraid that
art is useless.

they are gone. and all those people. i keep sitting on
my stoop looking
towards the right, to where they were, thinking they
will reappear. a dazed
businessman impeccably dressed, save for the white
dust covering his shoes,
passes.  he doesn't seem to know where he is going,
but his shoes tell where
he  has been. i think of picasso and how he reacted to
the bombing of
guernica. how he translated his pain and horror into a
monumental work
that moves and teaches us to this day. i return to my
wall.

if you look at the dust, one can see towers where
there are no towers. like
the amputee feeling the pain of phantom limbs.

i never really liked them. i protested their
construction. i was empire loyal,
resenting anything that might eclipse her. but through
the years, i not
only accepted, but also came to love them. it seemed
wonderful because
there were  two.

9.13

awoke to the cries of "usa! usa!" nationalism is
brewing. flags are flying.
the sight of them fills me with conflict, for ours is
a global concern. we are
on human time. we are new york. a thoroughly human
city. diversity is our
pride. humanity is our duty - to offer one's hand,
one's bread, one's prayer,
and one's human love, with no distinction of faith,
party, or nationality.

dawn has yet to break and i awoke to sirens and
thunder and the rain
against the skylight. volunteers' voices carry through
the stage set of our
streets. driven to be among them, i rise, dress
quickly, gather up my
required identification and enter into another world.

lines of emergency vehicles are exiting, moving south.
irrationally attached
to our checkpoint, now unmanned, i touch the discarded
barricade,
draped in rain-soaked steamers. the same yellow
streamers that stretch
across the white sheets adorning my wall. a face mask
hangs on the edge
of a long sawhorse that has restricted our street. the
still life of the hour.
lights cease flashing. the rain dissipates. houston
street re-opens. the
citizens reclaim sixth avenue.

only blocks away, workers mobilize, rescuers continue
through the night.
men cry out not to other men. i know nothing of the
pain of their labors, what
their eyes have seen, what their hands have clawed
through. jean genet
would have known how to glorify those callused hands.
i cannot even
offer to shake them. i feel conspicuously invisible,
dressed so poorly in the
pre-dawn of national mourning. when the sun rises i
shall dress in white,
with respect for the ash veiling our city. the ash of
our cremated towers.

9.14 a day of national mourning

it is a morning for mourning. we, the people of the
city, awaken to the rain.
the god of abraham is weeping. allah is weeping. the
feet of jesus, and
mohammed are wet with tears and the people bow and
grasp the damp earth.

a day of mourning, and for what shall we mourn? the 
humanity and the
humanity invested in its architecture? the fate of the
innocent afghan
peoples? shall we mourn our inability as a people to
communicate?

we are still the children of babel. speaking in
divided tongues, unable to
comprehend one another. the cries amongst the rubble
of that
colossal wreck are our own. babel's tower possessed
the collective
imagination of man. but they unlawfully penetrated the
dreams of god.
their ability to communicate was confounded to punish
them for a
lack of humility. perhaps when we humble ourselves as
a people, will
we communicate again.

9.15

once, in another century, i penned with arrogance, "i
am an american
artist, and i have no guilt." now i feel compelled to
utter, "i am an
american artist, and i feel guilty about everything."
in spite of this i will
not turn away: i will keep working. this i perceive as
duty. as i pray to
god that in days to come, i will not awake and rise
with the blood of the
afghan people dripping from my american hands.

9.16

may we ask for wisdom and, in possessing it, the moral
courage to exercise it.
may we ask to be emptied of hate so to attain harmony.
may we strive to comprehend one another.

9.17

for the first time since the attack, i enter a subway.
i go as far as broadway
& nassau and a walk to liberty street. i have my first
view of ground zero.
i come here with some reservation, as i do not wish to
trespass. but i want
some answer to a question vaguely formed. like a child
i want to see them,
or what is left of them, and say goodbye. i also
believe they will tell me
something of why i care for them so much, why i miss
them, and how they
should be remembered. in this pursuit i am ranted this
vision: from
liberty street i see their skeletal remains,
resembling brueghel's portrait
of babel. atop them two twisted fingers reach
heavenward in the perfect
shape of a v. the simple sign for peace.

we return to work. our mayor has wisely counseled us
to engage in our
daily human tasks. i know now why i mourn our towers.
because they
were young, and symbolized the optimistic strength of
our young nation.
my wall has twin sheets of paper. there is no image. i
have decided that is
my portrait. not what we see, but what we don't see
and will never see
again. two pure white sheets empty as the sky to the
right of my stoop
at the base of my street.       PATTI SMITH


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