World towers thrown into confusion.
Pictures posted on walls. Telephone calls:
all these people missing, lost in their namelessness.
Minutes wore on. Nothing we said,
no language in the world held any meaning.
We babbled words, reached for feelings,
sought structure and patterns in swelling ruins,
put a time and place on pain, talking,
smoothing edges, missing the point.
This story will be recalled, not as it happened,
but as a memory, a pebble in a pond:
reaction peaks, ripples spread, everything levels out.
But the stone sinks, deeper and darker.
There’s no bottom to this abyss.
We’re left only a vague sense of being home.
We lean out of windows, seeking some prior place,
some opportunity for hope. Still we breathe chalk
and dust: a horror lives in our chest,
as we’re stuck in a time long after we left it.
We ran for our lives; we returned for the same.
A cacophony of sights still shouts in our eyes.
A discordant silence slumbers in the city.
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