Showing posts with label 9-11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 9-11. Show all posts

Monday, September 11, 2017

Remembering 9-11

On the morning of September 11, 2001 my son and I were in the dining room, homeschooling, when my husband called the house from his office. He told me to turn on the television. I asked, what channel? And he said any channel.

Chris and I went into the living room and turned on the television. We saw the World Trade Center tower with smoke coming out of it. And within a few minutes we knew what had happened. And then we saw the plane hit the second tower.

We were riveted all morning and past lunch time, watching the horrors unfold before us. In the early afternoon I went to the local grocery store, just a few blocks away. I felt like I was moving in a dream, detached and groggy. I realized I was in shock.

Our son pulled together his most precious objects into his back pack. His baby blanket. His signed first edition of The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan. Mementos. My husband remembered commuting to New York City on a train filled with people who worked in the World Trade Center, and wondered. How many weeks did uncertainty and fear rule? I don't remember. But America changed that day, and we have reeled unmoored ever since.

I wrote a series of poems.


The Day After the World Changed

By Nancy A. Bekofske


September 12, 2001

I awoke in darkness.

What kind of world would I find today?

The taste of dust was in my mouth;

My eyes were red and dry.

The dull rhythm

Of a building’s dance of collapse

Resounded in my ears;

The dance burned into my vision,

Like the sun too long observed,

The slow gathering of downward motion,

Story after story,

Thousand of stories,

Stories that ended that day.



Would I ever again wake

And not wonder,

What kind of world

Will I find today?

Will there be chaos today?

Reversal of fortune, vulnerability?

Bloody War?

Dancing in the sky?

The Slow Dance





A needle pieced an eggshell.

Hell burst out golden red.

A magician’s gathering of slow smoke filled the air.

The war god’s companions, Fear and Panic,

Graced with their presence heroic exploits,

Coupled with shocked incredulity.



I write the reflection of time,

The house of cards raining down,

Raining a civilization into chaos.

Precious papers flew for miles,

Sturdy walls became dust.

Women and men flew like birds.

Their arms became wings,

The air rushing about them

Full of the dust of their lives,

Their world’s residence.

Other became bowels,

The secret heart buried deep.



The incredible beauty of summer sun

High in a blue, empty heaven was

Obscured by unnatural clouds,

Belied truth, for night had fallen in the land,

millions lost in darkness.

Flickering images told the story

Of a slow dance, the timeless, fragile beauty.



All time compressed into a few seconds

As each floor fell into the next,

Beam buckling inward,

Desks and file cabinets and hopes and security

Instantly reduced

To cockroach shells,

Settling into a covering like new snow.

Twisted, broken, the grand dames

Mere rubble, reduced to an essence.



Repeated over and over

This dance craze of the day,

The slow decay of seconds

Etched into the mirror of our eyes.



What We Imagine




Our child is in the white hospital bed.

There are tubes and alien machines surrounding him.

We watch and wait.

There is red blood, vivid on the white sheets

Like a beautiful rose.



No, our child is in the schoolroom,

There is a blinding light;

Wisdom is not so enlightening as this light.

There is a flash of heat.

There is ash.



No, our child is playing with friends.

There is coughing.

There is headache.

Our child goes to bed.

Our child breaks out in death.



No, our child is called.

Our child bravely leaves his only home

His only family.

Our child is trained to kill.

Our child falls, he thinks of home, he thinks no more.



No, our child wakes up in the morning.

Our child sees the rain.

Our child remembers the old life,

The days before fear,

The security of knowing there were those

Who would always protect him.

Our child awakes in the morning.

Our child imagines

There is no one to protect him.



Conversation




They talk of weddings and college.

They talk of jobs and money.

My ears burn in resentment.

I want to talk about death.



I want to talk about how

I became a zombie that day,

Detached from my motions,

A robot moving without a heart.



I want to talk about war

And rumors of war,

And about peace

And the illusion of peace.



I want to talk about the children

And about fear; especially about fear.

How it sleeps with you in your bed,

Nestles into your ear, whispering, whispering

Late into the night.

I want to talk about fear taking residence.



They talk about life.

I want to talk about death

And dancing. The dance of the towers

And the dance of politics

And the dance of death that day,

Surreal and strange, the snow of death,

After the golden red fire of impact.



They talk about money and work,

And I want to talk about the dread

Of war settling into our living rooms

Each morning and evening, visiting

With images of destruction and hate,

Daily becoming less alien,

More familiar and cozy.



Words circle ‘round like a hurricane

Ripping the façade away

Baring the essential passions

Like a bone.


World Trade Center ruins, photo by Spencer Platt
The Spires


Organ-pipe spires, thin and reaching,

Airy and proud.

The remnant backbone of life,

The skeleton of power.



Architecture of hope,

110 stories high,

made of hollow bones and glass,

housing a world’s hope.



Broken spires, still proud and tall

Rising above the chaos below,

Directing vision upward

Like a beacon.


When I consider how our son's life was framed by world events, I shudder. This was not the world I wanted to give my child. I am not ignorant. I know my parents grew up with the atrocities of WWII and lost friends in the war. And my grandparents had the War to End All Wars. My great-grandfather's nephew died in a death march in the Pacific. There is no end to the atrocities and hate we humans can embrace. We are a family bent on fratricide.

And yet somehow I trust that there is also a strain of mercy and compassion that survives, and sometimes even thrives. Stories of sacrifice and courage also came out of 9-11.

There is only one race, the human race, I was taught when I was a girl. The Big Blue Marble photograph of Earth reminds us that we are stewards sharing one miraculous, small Eden.

I continually pray for peace.



Sunday, February 15, 2015

Land of Enchantment by Liza Wieland


A moving and beautifully constructed novel, Land of Enchantment explores the relationship between art and life, mothers and daughters, women and men. After I had finished the book, I turned back to the beginning to study how the author developed the story and its themes. It's that kind of novel.

Brigid Long Night's language is color and form. After the tragic deaths of her Navajo/German parents she is employed by Georgia O'Keefe. New Yorker Julian Granger visits O'Keefe he and Brigid have a brief affair. Father Edgardo helps Brigid find a home for her baby and Brigid goes to New York City to start an art career that culminates in an installation at the World Trade Center.

Sasha Hernandez has lost her adoptive parents. She knows her mother is the famous artist Brigid Schulman. A film student in New York City, she captured the falling bodies from the World Trade Center on 9-11. She meets Rodney, a psychologist whose friend Henry Diamond has been searching for information about his sister Nancy who jumped from a collapsing building.

Wieland's book comes at the story from multiple viewpoints, utilizing first person and third person narratives, weaving the characters together in a complex interrelated web.

At times I was so moved I shuddered and turned away and inward, remembering that day, those images, the shock and resulting disassociation.

Art is compulsion for these characters: Brigid the painter, Sasha the film student, Nancy Diamond the playwright, Henry Diamond artist. It is how they process life.

I was greatly impressed by this book.

"We have art in order not to die of the truth." Frederich Nietzsche

Syracuse Press through NetGalley provided me the e-book for a fair and unbiased review.

Land of Enchantment
Liza Wieland
Syracuse University Press
Publication Date March 15, 2015
ISBN: 9780815610465
$24.95 hard bound





Wednesday, September 11, 2013

9-11

9-11. Four characters. That is all one has to say and we understand  everything.

I know that each generation has an event that changed everything. Or weeks or months or years which changed everything. Pearl Harbor. Fort Sumter. The Nazi invasion of one's home town in Europe. Hiroshima. The Titanic. The Lusitania. The Maine. Pogroms. The Influenza Epidemic. The scalping of an entire family. The Concentration Camp. The Internment Camp. The Refugee Camp. Ethnic Cleansing. There is no end to these horrors that stretch back beyond written history or even oral tradition. The Day That Changed The World.

And children do pick up on the fear. I remember the Cuban Missal Crisis, not because I watched the news or understood anything about Russia or politics, but because I remember coming downstairs from my afternoon nap to find the unusual sight of my parents watching television during the daytime. And they were worried about something. I had never before seen my dad scared. I was made aware that the world had its horrors and that my parents could be powerless to protect me.

I wrote a number of poems on 9-12. They are called The Day That Changed The World. This one is a response to fear. I have not edited or rewritten these poems. They just are.

What We Imagine
Nancy A. Bekofske

Our child is in the white hospital.
There are tubes and alien machines surrounding him.
We watch and wait.
There is red blood, vivid on the white
Like a beautiful rose.

No, our child is playing with friends.
There is coughing.
There is headache.
Our child goes to bed.
Our child breaks out in death.

No, our child is in the school room
There is a blinding light,
Wisdom is not so enlightening as this light.
There is a flash of heat.
There is ash.
  
No, our child is called.
Our child bravely leaves his only home
His only family.
Our child is trained to kill.
Our child falls, he thinks of home, He thinks no more.

No, our child wakes up in the morning.
Our child sees the rain.
Our child remembers the old life,
The days before fear.
Our child awakes in the morning.
Our child imagines

There is no one to protect him.