I step out from the subway stair;
Respectfully, I sniff the air.
Carbon.
Fire.
Asbestos.
Steel.
All speak to wounds that must not heal --
For of the thousands in the list
Of people lost, their presence missed,
Are many who will not be found
To lay in fam'lies' burial ground.
The twinnèd tow'rs that fell, afire,
Became in death their fun'ral pyre,
Their mausoleum, their cemetery...
There's nothing left of them to bury --
Just ashes,
blown upon the breeze
(that only seems to make us wheeze).
What requiem is this, for they
Who died upon that fateful day
And left this Earth without a trace
Or shred their children could embrace?
Grey ashes
in the mouth
and lung
A dirge that rests unsaid, unsung
While men in blue are lauded high
For those who fell out of the sky
And those who search for their remains.
Who, then, the common soul acclaims?
At least one voice,
one soul who must
Be burden'd with that sacred trust
Shall, with each breath of acrid air
Sing,
say,
or think
the solemn
prayer
That gives them peace.
Shalom.
Salaam.
Aloha.
Pax.
A song, a psalm
Of mem'ry. I must answer then,
"We'll not forget." Say ye, Amen.
I was working on John Street in lower
Manhattan around the period of September 11, 2001, though I was not in
the office that fateful day. The Monday following, when we were cleared
to return to work, I noticed a strange,
gray ash coating the canopies of the stores in the area, broken
storefront windows with that same gray ash coating the merchandise, and
the smell of Death and Destruction everywhere. In Judaism,
we are taught that when we encounter the dead by the roadside, we are
obliged to bury them before sunset and to inform their next of kin --
but too many of the WTC victims were incinerated, cremated alive, their
only burial grounds deep within the lungs of those of us who lived or
worked near Ground Zero. I found myself in the spiritual quandry of how to
discharge that obligation of burial and notification without names or
contact information, or even whole bodies -- only the knowledge that I carried
some part of many of them within me, and that those ashes are what
medical professionals call "body burden" -- that is, wastes that the
human body cannot expel through its normal self-cleansing processes.
I was also annoyed and angry that the news media at that time appeared
to focus primarily on the fire, police, and rescue workers who died in
the line of duty that day while ignoring the thousands of civilians --
tens of thousands, we'd thought at the time -- who, never having
chosen to risk their lives for the lives of others, perished in the
attacks nonetheless. While we know the names of all of the "men in
blue" who gave the Ultimate Sacrifice, we shall never never know the names of all of
the civilians they tried to save, but couldn't.
In the end, my release came in discussion and in poetry. This Requiem
took about six weeks to find its final form, being released on
10/24/01, just in time for Samhain/All Saints/All Souls -- a time at
which the veil between this Life and the next is said to thin, and we
might meet up with those who have passed on before. While it took me
several months of more dark poetry to come out of the depression we all
went through, this poem was the key. --BFB