Poetry
Famous by Omission
September 11th is still a near memory to those who survived the attacks. Had I listened to recordings from the IAM conference while here, wrapped in the insulation of middle Tennessee and heard all the references to 9/11, I would have thought what I was hearing occurred 5 years ago. As it is, I am not surprised. We stayed 3 blocks away from ground zero last week and the hole in the ground and the gap in the skyline continues to echo through the city like a siren.
There is still a lot of debate about how to publicly memorialize 9/11 but in the days and weeks after the attack the response of the public was immediate and surprising. I’m told poetry was suddenly everywhere in the city. People put poems on fences and lampposts and sent them to the newspapers in never before experienced numbers. There is something about poetry that communicates past the words used to comprise it and into our frustrated inability to say what our hearts truly feel and what our fears sometimes will not let us confront.
There is memorial in the city partially comprised of a large LED screen that scrolls poems and essays composed to commemorate the tragedy. You could stand in front of the screen and read for 36 hours before the text would repeat. There was a poem originally intended to be included in the memorial collection but was omitted because the words brought to mind images some felt would be too graphic to recall. Often things gain greater notoriety from their exclusion than from their inclusion. I was shown this poem by a friend and NYC native. It is called “Photograph from September 11” by Nobel prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska.
Photograph from September 11
They jumped from the burning stories, down
—one, two, a few more
higher, lower.
A photograph captured them while they were alive
and now preserves them
above ground, toward the ground.
Each still whole
with their own face
and blood well hidden.
There is still time,
for their hair to be tossed,
and for keys and small change
to fall from their pockets.
They are still in the realm of the air,
within the places
which have just opened.
There are only two things I can do for them
—to describe this flight
and not to add a final word.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
