"postmortem" poems - Hello Poetry

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

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Sep 11, 2013

Sep 11, 2013 at 6:36 PM UTC

nat-lipstadt

9/11 Distilled

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