9/11

The world has changed a lot since then Has changed In a strange disheveled way It was a September when fall Was not a season juicy with fruit Nor Eden's Sword intimated brutes. After plane and cargo In the frantic fiery billow Throwing smoke over a city's landscape And the pungent odor Acrid with finished flesh And the ashes of vulnerable tears In a spot of loneliness After crumbled glass and steel And the rubble Of a century burying the fine design That marked our culture's pride Against such an intimate sense Of ultimate violation And gray dust makes its layer Of grief in the crowded heart Let me condemn The infidels that changed the focus Of belief From the most abstract width of freedom To the daily tedium In which we move away From the cankered presence Of yesterday's chilling memory My ire Gust opprobrium of fire Not for the mangled history That shredded the innocence of belief But for the dismal deluge of a faith That brook a salvation Festered with this vast leprosy of hate For I could not then From classroom where my students collapsed Into the hollowness that was all of us Believing their parents perished in the dust That flew on the doldrums of our hope O I could not then Rightly evaluate my life's duration Beyond the shuddering boom of doom Beyond the shriveled expectation For vengeance So I distance my memory from the horror Of sweating nights and sudden sounds But cannot scrape away the terror's slime Of freedom shrinking from a quarter to a dime For I could not then see us Reduced to drivel In fear, fragmenting porous piles of dust.