Place Memory
(Church Street, NYC - Downtown at Ground Zero)
You are part of me now - predators and prey.
I, the orifice for the cluster fuck
between power and the powerless,
bore witness to everything,
absorbed the piss and stench
of humanity’s inanity,
shouldered the dissension
of the contented and discontents;
suffered the rape of ethos and psyche.
Oh, how I agonized under the coming of human wreckage
took into my character the rain of mortar and limbs
twisted steel and torsos, blood and dust
hopelessness and hope thrashed about my gapping cavity,
now a graveyard.
It all proved relative in the hush of mourning;
carnage defined me, held me captive to fatality,
rendered me a morbid tourist attraction.
But persistence, sentinel to creature and mind
rumbled my epicenter, cut a new path,
the linger of death dissipated
Nowadays, the clamor of continuance surges upward
penetrates this concrete epidermis with a rush
of life impermeable, pushes onward the survivors
and gives rise to resilience of spirit;
resurrection pulses within me to forward passage.
But I don’t forget, still feel them all
their transience hovers over the heartiness
decrees living more sacred
(2004)
I was in NYC when the Path Train between NYC and New Jersey reopened. I was standing on the street in Lower Manhattan a couple of streets away from Ground Zero when I felt the train rumble under my feet. I felt a flood of emotions and began writing in my hotel room later that day. I worked this poem for over a year before it found its voice.
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