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THE TOWER by Eric Rosenbloom copyright 2001 It rose like a cocksure finger goosing the sky, Another digit strong in self regard Loomed across the vast unplanted plaza, Mere humanity could only shrink In awe before the closed and soaring form. Fifty thousand souls would toil within, Some to eke a mean survival, Some to turn more fortune to yet more, Some to serve, some directing, Others passing through — to shop and eat, Emerge from tunnels, spread through the district, Or ride to the outrageous height and amidst The clouds photograph the unnatural view. So ugly and proud in its pure artifice, Yet man-made and humanized by all the lives That yearned or learned to accommodate Those grotesque and over-dominating spires, The tower became mundane, up close another Office building, from afar a compass point. A pile of rubble, twisted broken steel, And six thousand mangled corpses — how Does the mind make a place to hold such absence? Who dares to boast a return to normal, a pledge To build again on the graves of the slaughtered? Gone — the body aches to see them still, For the sounds of six thousand fewer voices, Aches to touch the loved one lost among the lost. A plane is crashed into a tower: It burns, the people burn, the rescuers arrive. The act is repeated on the tower’s twin. As those who are left to make the long descent Stagger down the smoke-filled stairways, One and then the other building crumbles. Within a week, the site still burning, Bodies still inside the unmoved wreckage, Neighbors return to trade their stocks and bonds, The heady exchange of capital resumes Behind the ash-caked windows and new barricades While the president vows to rid the world of evil. What new sorrows will we know if nothing changes? |