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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE SIX: Oct-Dec (01) > September 11, 2001 (Writings) >Jude Rittenhouse/Letter from Planet Earth, September 2001

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It was afternoon on Tuesday, September 11, before I received an e-mail from
my love who spends each week working in New York City. Knowing, finally, that
he was indeed alive and relatively safe, I began this poem and worked on it
through the week. On Thursday, I smelled an acrid stench in the air all
morning. I thought it must be the neighbors burning something until I went
to the beach and realized the smell penetrated even there--hiding within the
ocean-scented air. Silence screamed above me through the empty sky as I
realized the wind blew from the southeast--from New York City.


* * *


"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each
man's life a sorrow and a suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
--Longfellow

Thousands dead, missing and children
asking questions
no one can answer as their parents

long for yesterday's
dawn, for those days of waking to inhale
air perfumed

by the security that lovers,
daughters, sons, mothers, fathers--all
would come home

at the end of the day. In the stench of smouldering
remains, impossible scenes
keep replaying. Airplanes we rode like buses or

trains to meetings and family holidays
crash into and crumble
our strongest structures. Four people, hand in hand,

leaping together and a man
with his suit
on fire falling out of the smoke-filled sky. The final lie

has fallen. No one
can ever again feel certain what lies
beyond the curtain of this moment. Each of us

will choose
where our hearts land when this day
fades to dust

like the cloud still rising
from the tip of Manhattan. We will choose
to forget

or remember
how our lives stretch out interweaving fingers
like those people

who leapt--hands interconnected--as if they recognized
the only wisdom is skin holding us
in, arms reaching

out, hearts remembering our common
ground: this dust
we all come from. This earth. This Now.
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