Prompt # 71
I've been up since 6:00. I've been waiting for the words to come. Dragging my heavy feet my head pointed down, my reluctant fingers bunched in the pockets of my sweatshirt that needs washing. All the clothes need washing. The dishes need washing. My burned hand is almost capable again. The air feels cool on the pink new skin coming up under the thick dying lizard skin of my burn that is drying and cracking and peeling back, taking it's time. The things I need two hands to do are stacking up in their 3 dimensional visual list that I can't escape from and I'm waiting on this burn, this slow healing burn to be done. It's like waiting on the words that don't want to be written today.
This is an anniversary month. September always has been. Anniversary. It's a strange word to use for bad things, for dark things. It's a word that wants to be balloons and champagne but instead is fast skittering shadows that make my heart race and my stomach hurt for no apparent reason. See every year I forget. Every year I forget all the days that are anniversaries of old traumas that I don't want to think about. And often I don't. But my body remembers. My legs shake when I walk, my hands shake over the keyboard, my heart races and skips and races and skips. There are strange pains, old pains that will shout out their remembering against my no. Hands over my ears. Eyes that shutter closed. My teeth hurt from clenching my jaw against speech. My fingers move anyway. Come out from their pocketed hiding place.
This is an anniversary month. September has always been and every year since 2001, September has been an anniversary month for this country and September 11, in particular, a bleak anniversary day for this country. We are babies to this kind of grieving. Not of war but of feeling threatened on our own impermeable soil.Young to terrorist attack in our own cities, young in a world where countries of people like you and me live with the threat of bombs and screams and terror as part of the every day of their lives.Every day is a bad anniversary day in some places. Some places where nothing and nowhere is safe and sometimes the attack is of our very own making.
September 11, planes turned into something else entirely, all the world watching and waiting because the television brings it right to where we sit, close enough to touch the screen but not smell the smoke unless we were close. It shocked us into fear, it shook us into grief but ours is young and new for most of us- compared to countries where people live with this fear every day. It's bad, this is a bad day every year. It is an anniversary month, this is an anniversary day beginning in 40 minutes, beginning at 8:46 am on this day, it's a bad day to remember. It makes my own story seem smaller. The day where hands and fists turned into something else entirely, where what should have been a normal day became something else, where blood was spilled and things were stolen that you can't get back, like safety and feeling like a plane is just a plane, a hand is just a hand.
The big anniversary on this day trumps my smaller one, makes me feel guilty for feeling guilty, not just for my own embodied grief's reluctant remembering, but for my big american grief remembering when in many other places in the world, mothers try to cover the bodies of their children before they become bodies of their children. We are young in this kind of grief. We are young in this remembering of things. It is hard to find the words for the remembering of these things. Hard to describe the stretching out beyond myself into a country I live in, into a family I came from, into a larger world I live in. Grief is grief. Dark is dark. Loss is loss.
The words all feel wrong, flat and in black and white when the colors should be black and red and white. Black for ash and red for blood and the painted sound of screaming and white for bone. I cannot think in blues today. Our flag does not give my comfort. The pictures of a strangely stiff smiling family do not give me comfort. This belonging I have (and I do not want to sound ungrateful for the gifts of that belonging) is not enough.
The words are all wrong. Anniversary is not the word. Loss is not the word. Remembering is not the word. Sorrow is not the word. Patriotism is not the word. Death is not the word. Children might be the word. The children left behind on days when planes are not just planes and hands are not just hands and flags are symbols that equal safety or fear depending on where you stand and what ash filled light you are squinting through to see them.
Children might be the word.
This is all these fingers can find to give you today.
***
Separation
BY W. S. MERWIN
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
***
Invitation to Ground Zero
BY WILLIAM JAY SMITH
Into the smouldering ruin now go down:
And walk where once she walked and breathe the air
She breathed that final day on the burning stair
And follow her, beyond the fleeing crowds,
Into the fire, and through the climbing clouds.
Into the smouldering ruin now go down:
And find, in ashes bright as hammered tin,
A buried bone-white naked mannikin
That flung from some shop window serves to bind
Her body, and its beauty, to your mind.
William Jay Smith, "Invitation to Ground Zero" from Hudson Review. Copyright © 2003
***
For the Children of the World Trade Center Victims
Nothing could have prepared you—
Note: Every poem I have ever written
is not as important as this one.
Note: This poem says nothing important.
Clarification of last note:
This poem cannot save 3,000 lives.
Note: This poem is attempting to pull your father
out of the rubble, still living and glowing
and enjoying football on Sunday.
Note: This poem is trying to reach your mother
in her business skirt, and get her home
to Ridgewood where she can change
to her robe and sip Chamomile tea
as she looks through the bay window at the old,
untouched New York City skyline.
Note: This poem is aiming its guns at the sky
to shoot down the terrorists and might
hit God if He let this happen.
Note: This poem is trying to turn
that blooming of orange and black
of the impact into nothing
more than a sudden tiger-lily
whose petals your mother and father
could use as parachutes, float down
to the streets below, a million
dandelion seeds drifting off
to the untrafficked sky above them.
Note: This poem is still doing nothing.
Note: Somewhere in this poem there may be people alive,
and I’m trying like mad to reach them.
Note: I need to get back to writing the poem to reach them
instead of dwelling on these matters, but how
can any of us get back to writing poems?
Note: The sound of this poem: the sound
of a scream in 200 different languages
that outshouts the sounds of sirens and
airliners and glass shattering and
concrete crumbling as steel is bending and
the orchestral tympani of our American hearts
when the second plane hit.
Note: The sound of a scream in 200 languages
is the same sound.
It is the sound of a scream.
Note: In New Jersey over the next four days,
over thirty people asked me
if I knew anyone in the catastrophe.
Yes, I said.
I knew every single one of them.
-BJ Ward
from Gravedigger’s Birthday (North Atlantic Books)
Be easy with you today as Jen would say. Even if you are not feeling grief, it's in the air. Big anniversary days are hard in the world. People can be frenetic and lost and even dangerous. Be extra kind to you and to those around you. Write if you can. If you can't, do anything else, but do it all the way. Rest with complete abandon, sometime today. Taste the lunch you eat and pay attention. Find the places in your body that feel steady and sit there awhile. Look at the sky.
***
Nothing could have prepared you...
***
This poem says...
***
Separation is like...
***
I remember or she remembers or he remembers...
***
May this day be extra good to you and your creative.
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