How I Feel This Morning
~*~
Just After Midnight Last Night
The
Thirteenth precinct is prepared to memorialize. These are three lost in
the trade center attacks back in 2001. Neighbors, Jenny Hurwitz and Sami-Rose
brought the orchid, others brought the wreath and more flowers. They
power washed the street and artifacts. That metal beam is from the
towers. I was here. Our street turned into police central and we had to
carry I.D. to get on or off the block for a month or more. I witnessed
dust covered people staggering home and after,
all the television coverage. I called family and friends (thanks to my
plug in land line of old, when all the cell phones died, I got through),
Then I helped my gardening friend at Gramercy park get what she needed
(batteries, flashlights, water, some food and cash from her account). At
some point I walked to my friend Amy Ernst down on Broadway. She was
frozen in fear. I'm pretty sure I spent the night home in the dark, but
shock has a way of blurring those days after. I'm pretty sure if I dug
out the diaries, I'd find references, but I'm not doing that.
~*~
"At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a
photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through
the sky—falling through time as well as through space. The picture went
all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away."
"One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the
Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not
yet seen. Richard Drew's photograph is all we know of him, and yet all
we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The
picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory
of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one
simple acknowledgment,"
READ
LINK
Time Line With Photographs
~*~
1 comment:
Working through your links is a sad but welcome reminder of a truly terrible day. Watching people fall must have been life altering for those who witnessed it. I am a little surprised by the rejection of the idea of jumping by some of the families. Those deaths weren't suicides...they were people taking the last bit of control that they would be allowed. If I had been there I think I would have jumped. At least for a few seconds I could fly.
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