911 Carousel
by Michael R. Burch

“And what rough beast ... slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”—W. B. Yeats

They laugh and do not comprehend, nor ask
which way the wind is blowing, no, nor why
the reeling azure fixture of the sky
grows pale with ash, and whispers “Holocaust.”

They think to seize the ring, life’s tinfoil prize,
and, breathless with endeavor, shriek aloud.
The voice of terror thunders from a cloud
that darkens over children adult-wise,

far less inclined to error, when a step
in any wrong direction is to fall
a JDAM short of heaven. Decoys call,
their voices plangent, honking to be shot ...

Here, childish dreams and nightmares whirl, collide,
as East and West, on slouching beasts, they ride.

Published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Mindful of Poetry, Gostinaya and Scholasticus/Fullosia Press. Keywords/Tags: 911, war, violence, retribution, twin towers, terror, terrorism, east, west, dreams, nightmares, error

Salve
by Michael R. Burch

(for the victims and survivors of 9-11)

The world is unsalvageable ...

but as we lie here
in bed
stricken to the heart by love
despite war’s
flickering images,

sometimes we still touch,

laughing, amazed,
that our flesh
does not despair
of love
as we do,

that our bodies are wise

in ways we refuse
to comprehend,
still insisting we eat,
drink ...
even multiply.

And so we touch ...

touch, and only imagine
ourselves immune:
two among billions

in this night of wished-on stars,

caresses,
kisses,
and condolences.

We are not lovers of irony,

we
who imagine ourselves
beyond the redemption
of tears
because we have salvaged
so few
for ourselves ...

and so we laugh
at our predicament,
fumbling for the ointment.

Keywords/tags: 911, war, survival, survivors, recovery, love, *******, ***, tears, redemption, bodies, flesh, touch, caresses

Break Time
by Michael R. Burch

for those who lost loved ones on 9-11

Intrude upon my grief; sit; take a spot
of milk to cloud the blackness that you feel;
add artificial sweeteners to conceal
the bitter aftertaste of loss. You’ll heal
if I do not. The coffee’s hot. You speak:
of bundt cakes, polls, the price of eggs. You glance
twice at your watch, cough, look at me askance.
The TV drones oeuvres of high romance
in syncopated lip-synch. Should I feel
the underbelly of Love’s warm Ideal,
its fuzzy-wuzzy tummy, and not reel
toward some dark conclusion? Disappear
to pale, dissolving atoms. Were you here?
I brush you off: like saccharine, like a tear.

Keywords/Tags: 911, victims, survivors, grief, loss, heal, healing, tear, tears, coffee, break, time, milk, artificial, sweeteners

Mending
by Michael R. Burch

I am besieged with kindnesses;
sometimes I laugh,
delighted for a moment,
then resume
the more seemly occupation of my craft.

I do not taste the candies;
the perfume
of roses is uplifted
in a draft
that vanishes into the ceiling’s fans

that spin like old propellers
till the room
is full of ghostly bits of yarn ...
My task
is not to knit,

but not to end too soon.

This is a poem for the survivors of 9–11 whose families lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks. Keywords: 911, survivors, victims, first, responders, passengers, firemen, police, heroes, terrorist, attacks, World Trade Center, Flight 93, Pentagon, White House

Because Her Heart Is Tender
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth, on the first anniversary of 9-11

She scrawled soft words in soap: “Never Forget”
dove-white on her car’s window (though the wren,
because its heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her). As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.

She wrote in sidewalk chalk: “Never Forget”
and kept her heart’s own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.

Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers’ glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on ...
she stitches in damp linen: “NEVER FORGET”
and listens to her heart’s emphatic song.
(The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when nestlings fell beyond, beyond, beyond ...
love's reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.)

She writes in adamant: “NEVER FORGET!”
because her heart is tender with regret.

Published by Neovictorian/Cochlea, The Villanelle, The Eclectic Muse, Nietzsche Twilight, Nutty Stories (South Africa), Poetry Renewal Magazine, and Other Voices International. Keywords/Tags: villanelle, 911, terror, terrorism, never, forget, heart, tender, regret, heroism, patriotism, courage, sacrifice

Flight 93
by Michael R. Burch

I held the switch in trembling fingers ... asked
why existence felt so small, so meaningless,
like a minnow squirming feebly in my grasp ...

... vibrations of huge engines thrummed my arms
as, glistening with sweat, I nudged the switch
to OFF ... I heard the klaxon’s shrill alarms

like vultures’ shriekings ... earthward, in a stall ...
we floated ... earthward ... wings outstretched, aghast
like Icarus ... as through the void we fell ...

till nothing was so beautiful, so blue ...
so vivid as that moment ... and I held
an image of your face, and dreamed I flew

into your arms ... the earth rushed up ... I knew
such comfort, in that moment, loving you.

NOTE: This poem imagines the struggle in the cockpit for control of the Flight 93 airplane. The terrorists apparently intended to crash the plane into the White House. The heroic passengers kept that from happening, at the cost of their lives. Keywords/Tags: 9-11, sonnet, Flight 93, terrorists, terrorism, heroes, heroism, courage, bravery, loyalty, patriotism, sacrifice, love

(a poem for Christina-Taylor Green, who
was born on September 11, 2001 and who
died at age nine, shot to death ...)

Child of 9-11, beloved,
I bring this lily, lay it down
here at your feet, and eiderdown,
and all soft things, for your gentle spirit.
I bring this psalm — I hope you hear it.

Much love I bring — I lay it down
here by your form, which is not you,
but what you left this shell-shocked world
to help us learn what we must do
to save another child like you.

Child of 9-11, I know
you are not here, but watch, afar
from distant stars, where angels rue
the evil things some mortals do.
I also watch; I also rue.

And so I make this pledge and vow:
though I may weep, I will not rest
nor will my pen fail heaven's test
till guns and wars and hate are banned
from every shore, from every land.

Child of 9-11, I grieve
your tender life, cut short ... bereaved,
what can I do, but pledge my life
to saving lives like yours? Belief
in your sweet worth has led me here ...

I give my all: my pen, this tear,
this lily and this eiderdown,
and all soft things my heart can bear;
I bring them to your final bier,
and leave them with my promise, here.

*

Published by The Flea, The Lyric, Copia Posterous, Elizabeth’s Ramblings, Legacy.com and Fullosia Press

Keywords/Tags: Child, beloved, lily, eiderdown, psalm, shooting, gun, violence, massacres, 9-11, evil, NRA, guns, war, wars, hate, hatred

There is a wound,
black as a cave and burning,
Smoke, and then people, pour out.

Look up, up
beyond the roar of metal
beyond the seething, traumatized pixels
that clutch their ******* set out to sag with milk and blood.
beyond how far your eyes will naturally go,
and you can see it-
the flap of a purple tie
(his son insisted on it)
and that was her sister’s green dress
(they wore the same size in everything).
small and out of the blue
they plummet as children.
so we the people or as we were later titled bystanders
want to hold them in our arms
we want to grab them out of the sky, yes,
grab them with those awful thoughts of belonging.
that you ought to be here, with me
on this ground that will inevitably
lead to homes that haven’t used up
all their printer paper on fliers.
home, not the sound of a car crashing
into another car except
we know it’s you and the pavement
and it’s all right if we can’t scrub all of it from our heads and faces, just please try to be down here with us, walking sometime tomorrow and
19 years from today
same old same old
New Yorkers pounding the concrete
upright, wearing our dress shoes
with a shirt we bought after we somehow
were all walking the day after that and our
minds were still spiraling the shaky little walking path we made
around the first woman who just wouldn’t
stop falling and bursting open
falling and bursting open
and falling and falling open again.


jump into the promise that
i will try to catch you.
even if it’s on the flip side, baby,
just please trust that i’ll be standing,
rippling in blue,
right where you need me to be.

The poem was inspired by a particular photo of the WT C, and after that by my first visit to the 9/11 Memorial.  On the day of 9/11, I was working about a diagonal mile away, and from our windows, we could see people jumping to their death.

Open sky annulled
to bordered lines of
uptown edges,
worldview momentarily
forcibly redefined by
memories of buildings and sadder days,
recollections of pillars of biblical smoke rising

A photograph
makes me look up,
and sit down historically,
need to catch a breath,
to rest mentally,
upon a storied small bridge's steps,
that I well recall,
a disappeared street stoop.
all were rubble then and once
upon that day.

Wear, tear, and older eyes distill perspective,
but the hardy heart is hardly stilled
by the recognizable gray upon
bon vivant gray reflective surfaces of
memories of buildings and sadder days

So today, on a reborn street,
I rest upon reconstituted speckled curbstone,
the city's lowered down ledges,
the city's lowered down-town boundaries,
constantly redrawn, but
nonetheless, always rebuilt from their own
regenerated stony compost,
and the NY passersby doesn't even notice
a man, head in hands,
silently weeping, thinking that:

We throw away so much we should have kept.
We keep so much we should have thrown away.

Lose keepsakes, but keep our mysterious sadnesses
locked away in compartments that open only to
benedictions uttered in ancient tongues.

Make your own list,
be your own curator,
catalogue visions of sophomoric triumphs,
museum mile pile
those early poetic drafts,
be unafraid of memories
raw and ungentrified,
overlaid, buried underneath
postmortem of dust-piles of senior critiques

Finally went downtown to see
where the blessed water falls
into catacomb pits that once
were the foundations
of buildings that ruled the cityscape,
downtown anchors
for a modern city that exists
only because it was built on
million year old granite bedrock

Stone monuments are stolid, discrete.
Memories are of grayed, frayed edge consistency.
Negatives resurrected that survive digitally,
all blend synthetically, layer upon layer,
essence distilled in a single,
black and white photograph
that serves to
disturb complacency,  
awaken stilled pain,
reflections suppressed,
are restored