Witness

Sirens put the word in the poet’s head:
“Find the wail colloquial,”
so she saw.
She saw that finger of some
strange god
burning oblivion, burning like
some grotesque giant cigarette ad
or a cattail on fire in July,
and the black was still,
and the man, with knit African homeland cap
covering mass of dreadlocks,
hunkered on the bench beside her
while she stood, poised,
over the rail directly across.

Their eyes, unblinking, dry,
perpetually startled—
they would be every time they looked—
as if the Challenger were exploding over the harbor
with 30,000 astronauts aboard,
as if the mothership hovered over the city,
as if they were Jackie Kennedy in a pink pillbox hat
perched next to her husband in an open car at Dealy Plaza,
like all that, with wonder
and incomprehension,
and hurry do something do something
move limbs
move hands move move move somewhere.

It disintegrated before their eyes.
It disintegrated before the mute and life-jacketed
passengers on the ferry
before the truant schoolboys
with their backpacks
before frightened mothers
pushing unsuspecting baby strollers
and the cloud, not black now but white
cumulo-nimbus to the fiftieth power,
slouching, prowled lower Manhattan
and crept to the Battery,
fanning out to the Island.

Thousands streamed,
evacuees over the ferry ramp:
a human river of ash, shoeless and dazed.
Brass-plated name tags pinned
to traders’ jackets
reflected the dissolute morning sun;
freckled-faced working girls cried
for their mothers;
huddled masses, numb with confusion dared
not look back at the New Jerusalem.

They carried on their shoulders the yoke
of a pulverized city:
ash made of concrete, paper, and life.

The air is lead now.
Unshorable fragments are hauled
along the expressway
in tarp-covered trucks.
Drugstores have run out of pocket packs of tissues.
Amazing Grace bagpipes
make everyone wince.
Empty firefighters’ helmets are placed
beside the Easter candle,
and borrowed coffins, flag-draped,
are borne upon brave shoulders,
are held aloft, light,
filled only with eternal light,
an outward sign of the disappeared
of the eleventh day
of the month of Our Lady of Sorrows.

— Marguerite María Rivas