What a difference
a few hours can make. Yesterday as I drove to work I wrote "what kind of an omen is a slow orange truck?" Today we have an answer. As I was writing "omen" a hi-jacked airliner was plowing into one of the towers at the World Trade Center in New York City, and twenty minutes later another airliner plowed into the other tower. Why don't poets go to war? I know I don't have the stomach for it. It looks like a cheap Japanense science fiction movie - airliner smashing into tall building, building crumbling and leaving dust clouds, thousands of people killed. The background on all the news shows last night was New York City, sometimes the Pentagon, both of which look like war zones.
I have the radio in the car on - I usually don't. The sky overhead is empty. Yesterday as I drove to work I saw the lines of two or three vapor trails.
Siding of most of the west side of our house has been completed - there is some reassurance in that, even as the world around us looks as if it has been overcome with madness.
The empty sky is eerie, unmarked from east to west, a blue smoothness that will never be the same.
The blue smooth-
ness of sky will
never be smooth
again. The world
has cracked like
a seed husk, dry
and a long way
from water,
from hope.
If only other poets felt the way you do, there might be fewer wars, I'm thinking. Unfortunately, all too many of us *do* go to war - figuratively, at least.
Posted by: dave | September 12, 2007 at 07:17 AM