Six years out

I wrote this poem in 2001.

10 December 2001 from LaGuardia

The rapidly ascending spiral
of a DC-bound shuttle plane
rises steeply over a late-
morning early December
sun-dappled
lower Manhattan.

Inside the cabin Fox news
(‘fair and balanced news,’ ha)
juxtaposes on a split-screen
images of 7 December 1941
and 11 September 2001 of
people fleeing in the streets and
plumes of grey smoke.

Though separated by sixty years
the effect of the attack—panic and terror—
is the same.

Outside on this bright but hazy day
lower Manhattan sits serenely.

Everything is in place—the
Triboro, Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges,
the Chrysler, Empire and Pan Am buildings.

All is well and where it belongs.

Except now there’s a hole in the skyline
of lower Manhattan
where the tip drifts off into nothing.

And there’s a hole in my heart
that not even a sun-flecked morning
can heal.

At least yet.

10.12.01

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The background to this poem is that I was flying on 10 December to Washington DC for the meeting that was supposed to taken place on 11 September.

On that morning six years ago, I was in the Manchester NH airport trying to get a Southwest 10.30 flight to Baltimore-Washington for a meeting at Virginia Theological Seminary. I hadn't been listening to the radio as I drove to the airport so that when I went through security at 9.10, I had no idea of what was happening. I was aware of the fact that there were lots of people milling around, and as I tore to the gate (to get an 'A' group boarding pass), I noticed a knot of people looking at a television through the restaurant windows. I clearly remember seeing a lot of vertical lines but it didn't register. At the gate, they had put up 'delayed' and when I asked how long the flight would be delayed, they said they didn't know. I bought my New York Times (with articles about elections that day) and asked the newspaper vendor what was going on. When she said that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I said she was joking me. She said no. I backtracked to the people watching the television and it registered.

I was on the phone (payphone calling collect) with my father (my parents were convinced I was on the plane that had crashed into the Pentagon) when the first WTC collapsed. I watched on a television that was 30 feet away. (It wasn't until a year ago that I heard the soundtrack as it were....)

The last thing I did upon leaving the airport and all that confusion at 10.10 was to leave the green plastic Southwest ticket on the counter because I didn't need or want it.

I wept the whole way back to Vermont and our safe mountains for all we had lost.

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I still do but for very different reasons.