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Life Arts    H4'ed 5/8/25

My visit to Ground Zero with my father, 11/11/2001


Gary Lindorff
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O dove, pure white, iconic

Herald of peace, stand-in for the holy ghost,

Bird of love who soars

Over disaster's threshold,

O living emoji, tattooed on the arm

Of Hell's Angel turned peace-maker,

Creature always most welcome

In our darkest hours . . .


Having just walked past Ground Zero

Where fragments of the facade of the two towers

Were leaning

Like the punched out frames of stained glass windows,

Past a two blocks-long chain link fence adorned

With photos of the dead, flowers, poems and charms . . .

And just when I couldn't take in any more

There was a little park

Overshadowed by derelict buildings

Draped in black as if in mourning,

The ash of the disintegrated monoliths

And 3000 incinerated souls

Still covering window ledges

And awnings like moondust . . .


And yet there were no tears in me

No water, like a holy spring gone dry . . .

And then, a miracle -

You landed on a branch just above me,

And then I cried,

Boy did I cry!

Did the vacuum of my vacuous spirit draw you to me?

Is that how this works?

I thought that you would fly

When I stood up but you didn't . . .


I had to get back to where I left my father

Waiting in a post Apocalyptic cafe sipping bitter coffee

Underneath a hanging lightbulb

Powered by a communal generator

That was turning gas into electricity

Sending it out through orange cords

Like mother's milk . . .



(Article changed on May 08, 2025 at 6:19 PM EDT)

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Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and (more...)
 

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