by Yocheved Friedman
An ode to the end, when it finally came to pass.
When the rubble and the dust settled and made the people black.
And the city was raining letterheads, hedge fund memos, pencil shavings, old reports and leftover Christmas cards.
Nearly until Christmas came and wind dispersed the white, synthetic rain.
And replaced it with white snow from the real sky.
When the end came and the buildings collapsed like walls of sand.
And a vacancy that was the end settled over the city, the boroughs and over the Brooklyn bridge that took the blackened people home that morning.
Ode to a mass urban exodus,
To the feeling of oblivion
And the sense of the end growing.
When the skyline was empty.
The world nursing its tremors,
the shock of the aftermath and the stench of its loss.
The people peeling the grime off of their business shirts.
Looking at wives and children and dogs from beneath the matted lives of lost people.
Maybe telling them that someday, the earth would be whole again.
Ode to the children, my brother, born a 2001 baby.
Born to an angry world.
Growing up on vicarious memories.
Learning to mourn a loss he did not live through.
Bowing heads at the right time,
Someone else’s tears.
Ode to the people putting the pieces of New York City back together.
The ones with dust in their lungs from the morning after.
The ones that endured the second tier of tragedy.
And finally, ode to the city that saved face when the end came.
That lived through the burning smell
That empty skyline.
The brief moment when it happened.
The paper snow that settled upon it for weeks and weeks.
Its people rushing away from it, away from the end.
Ode to the end when it finally came to pass.
When the rubble and the dust settled and made the people black.
