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for Focus 9/11 ©2001 Rochelle Ratner
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Focus
9/11: Poems Part II
guest
edited by Rochelle Ratner, continued
Click
poets' names below to read their poems,
or scroll down. 
Tracy
Mishkin | Barry Seiler| Jane
Augustine |
David Beckman
| Marilyn Kallet
Return:
Part I: Rochelle Ratner's Intro. to Focus
9/11 click here.
Implosion
by Tracy Mishkin
When
they knocked down Market Square
last summer, my son watched it turn
to girders and smoke as people cheered.
He replayed it daily in Legos until I walked him
down the street to Pokemon and playground bullies.
But
he came home mid-September drawing
buildings bisected by planes: "This is people falling.
This is fire. This is God frowning."
The
towers are red, the planes are black.
God's face is very small.
Tracy
Mishkin is an independent scholar and adjunct professor of English
at Butler University in Indianapolis. She is the author of The
Harlem and Irish Renaissances: Language, Identity, and Representation.
On
the Wall Street Ferry by
Barry Seiler
These
cell songs rend the still
Sea air what reaches us
Is static hints of human
Voices breaking up
Mother and daughter snap
As we glide by smoke and ruin
Discreetly veiled how proper
They seem in matching outfits
I so want to say prim
____________________
Ordinary Names by Barry Seiler
A
god in the shape
Of a cloud descends
And we are gone ex-
Tracted like a loose
Tooth a small gap crossed
By the tongue's rough tip
Recall us taste again
Our ordinary names
Meat of the living passed
Around the common table
Barry
Seiler’s most recent book of poems is Frozen Falls,
University of Akron Press, 2001. He divides his time between urban
New Jersey and rural upstate New York.
September
15, 2001, Lower Manhattan
at Pine and William Streets by
Jane Augustine
Four
days later, near the hollow
between standing buildings--but not
near enough, or too near--the pale
ash lay on cars, awnings, architraves,
hubcaps, on the high lamps' long
aluminum arms, in sidewalk crevices, on
curbstones, gutters, grills, ledges under
the plateglass windows of investment
banks, on manholes, drains, fire
hydrants, in cracks on macadam beside
marble steps up to the modern sculpture
whose bronze geometry blurred in dust;
in every wire twist of fence round wild
weeds in a vacant lot, each grass stem spiked
with fake white snow or spilled paint dulling
the green, and bits of flying paper, larger
gray flakes, blew--"Millenium Hotel," the rates
for luxury suites--impaled on auto antennae,
flattened on walls or stuck in street mud, while
everywhere the nearly invisible mist of ash
kept falling onto eyelids, brows, hair:
entering nostrils, ears, mouths, the utterly
pulverized, pure, fine atoms of bodies
of the dead sat on the tongues of the living.
Jane
Augustine
has published two books of poetry in 2002, Arbor Vitae
(Marsh Hawk Press) and Transitory (Spuyten Duyvil). She
is the editor of The Gift by H.D.: The Complete Text (UP
Florida 1998). She lives in New York City and Westcliffe, Colorado
Physiology,
9/13/01 by David Beckman
A
hand reaches into the chest,
encloses the heart
and squeezes.
Daily television keeps it tight,
daily papers keep it tight,
imagining the future keeps it tight.
Contracted muscles hate to release.
They are stubborn as stones.
____________________________
Montauk, New York, 10/17 by David Beckman
Atlantic
waves go blue to slate to dark green.
Fat clouds like those in children's books
ride overhead while surf whispers
in some language too old for speech.
A month ago did smoke of burning towers
migrate from Brooklyn past
Babylon, Patchogue, and Water Mill
to reach this stretch of sand?
And did a thousand
fading sparks,
freed from flesh,
ride that black wind
to alight just here,
between dunes and water?
Then we must kneel down,
as at some holy place.
David
Beckman is a published writer of fiction, plays, screenplays and
poetry. His novel, Under Pegasus was published by Golden
Grove Books. His plays include "Becoming
Walt Whitman,"
produced at the Powerhouse Theater in Santa Monica California.
He was in Manhattan on September 11. His poems on that event have
appeared in a privately published book accompanied by the eye-witness
drawings of artist Graeme Sullivan.
Yom
Kippur Remembrance , September 27, 2001
by Marilyn Kallet
They
were not love letters, they were
people, someone's mother, another's son.
Brave enough to leap, cheat fire,
some of them hand in hand.
This Yom Kippur we pray for
their families, for those "hurt,"
the rabbi says. Pray for the "wounded,"
she repeats. Mi shebareach, l'avosaynu.
Bless those in need of healing.
Are the dead past prayer?
Does our language mock them? Do we need
new words for images burned into our brains--
no, "burned" is a lie.
Yisgadal, Va yisgadash. Praise God.
We are the living. What
will
be the legacy of our heroes, who raced
up stairs to help others and crumbled
under firey rubble, under someone else's
idea of fame? Yom Kippur, we let go
of anger, quiet it the way we'd calm a sick child.
We forgive, ourselves, the vague ominous world.
Forgive God. Free will, the rabbi says.
The ashes fall again, forgive men's hands.
We see God in the faces of the
rescuers, she says. I believe her.
Don't write about disaster, our poet
laureate
says.
We know what happened. Tend the ordinary.
I believe him, pull dead leaves
from the mums. Miracle-Gro for them.
Sunlight and fasting for us.
Marilyn
Kallet
is the author of eight books, including How to Get Heat Without
Fire (poetry). Recent poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner,
Sport Literate, and Many Mountains Moving. Kallet directs
the creative writing program at the University of Tennesee.
The
above poems: Copyright © 2002 by their authors. All rights,
including electronic, are reserved by the authors and may not
be used without permission.
"Barbie"
9/11 Photo. Copyright (C) 2001 Rochelle Ratner.
 Focus
9/11: Poems edited
by Rochelle Ratner continues to
Part
III. Click
to the next poems....>
Ronald Wardell, Roger Mitchell, Barry Wallenstein, Michael Heller,
Kate Iscol,Sharon Olinka, Corinne Robins, Clara Sala....>>>
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Barry
Seiler| Jane Augustine |
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