written on the occasion of the 12-year anniversary after having visited the moving 9/11 Memorial & Museum
We were all New Yorkers on September 11
Filled with horror, shock, compassion and thirst for knowledge
How could this happen to ordinary people going to work?
Fathers, mothers of unborn children, firefighters, police
We pay our respects to the innocent
to those lives barely lived
to lives who meant something to a smaller circle
and now in their death matter to all of us.
All that remain are memories,
children resembling fathers they never met,
two deep pools of tears,
a survival tree,
stark inscriptions,
a graveyard of names--
thousands of them.
Like the Vietnam Memorial, we stop to read notes from kids to their lost parents,
from parents to lost children
Blue forget-me-nots, photographs, rosary beads and American flags resting on names,
Tributes from the aching...
I pause along the granite ledge and give a special nod to Flight 93
and acknowledge The Knowing,
the excruciating last phone calls
expectant wives expecting husbands to return home...
I traced my finger over Jeremy Glick,
one of the kamikaze heroes who summoned his courage
and rocked when asked to roll in the skies over Pennsylvania
Far from New York skyscrapers, symbolic of the American dream
Far from the intellectual hub of government, the cradle of our Democracy
There were plenty of other heroes,
Altruism in human form
We will never forget them
We will never forget
