Just ran across this from my author and editor friend Walter Donway.
I have another friend who told me of his story watching the entire horror rein down from the window of his 49th floor office in the Empire State Building. Tragic.
Walter mentions no government connection and I disagree to a point as both Iran and Saudi govermentsvare the wellspring of Islamic Totalarianism but this isn't a political thread so I hope that doesn't become a focus.
The words just moved me.
Made a tear fall.
Try to Remember (9/11)
I was in New York City, in my office at Fifth Avenue and 59th, on September 11, 2001. The office manager, Burt Mirsky, came in and said, "A plane has crashed into a World Trade Center tower."
I said, "Oh, a private plane?"
"No, it says commercial airliner."
"I doubt it."
All of it unfolded during the day. We ended, of course, grouped about the television set. Oddly, I don't think I left until quitting time. My apartment in the West Village with my wife is virtually in the shadow of the towers. No subways running there that day.
Beautiful autumn day, except that the air was filled with an acrid odor. I walked down Fifth Avenue, with my briefcase. It was just over three miles. Coming toward me were people with sooty faces and wild hair. I still can't interpret that. Were some survivors of the collapse of the twin towers only now walking home uptown?
I don't think I was in touch with my wife or Ethan all day. Not entirely sure what phones were working. But that is me, anyway.
My wife was down at her job at Little Red Schoolhouse, a prestigious private school on Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street. That day, the children were standing at the windows watching the disaster unfold: You could see the towers, from there. Faculty stayed later with kids until their parents came--or never came, as in a few cases.
Ethan was in school at Brooklyn Friends, in downtown Brooklyn, and tells me that they stood on the steps of the school and watched the clouds of black smoke billowint over Manhattan across the East River (not a "river," a tidal estuary).
This was a gigantic, almost miraculous triumph for Islamism. If you can do THAT to a city, a country, then suddenly (and ever since) you are taken very seriously. On my walks along the Hudson, on my runs in earlier days, driving back into Manhattan from any direction--the twin towers were the raised arms and fists of New York City.
Brought down in a single day not by a country, a government, but just 19 religionists ready to die for their cause. Few of them went to jail; one who did is now freed.
And in years since, I have walked along the Hudson and the sky has spoken loudly of...an absence. Experienced from any direction: the city streets, the sea, the air. It is gone.
Not very long after 9/11, I tried the impossible: to write a poem that might capture some part of what it meant to me to my countrymen. This is it:
Who knew that day
That we had buried her,
Untenderly, the way
A violated lady
Once elected to seek
Merciful obscurity?
O, she had been lovely.
She dared all who could see
To hope that life again
Might be as young, as new,
As the hearts of boys when
Their secret dreams are green.
So bountiful, and she
Was big and easy, too;
And because she was free
Drew so many to her side.
Her head was held so high:
Around her, only the sea,
Above her, only the sky.
They ever failed, who sought
To take her, so many sons
To keep her free had fought
Two centuries of wars.
Evil came stealthily
That morning, like the heart
Putrefied with envy.
Who spied the swooping blow
That ravished utterly—
Swift and obscene to know
What was untouchable?
Bickering, strutting down
Corridors of power,
Disposed for the eye: Who,
That day, was by her side—
That world men once called “new”?