twin towers, twenty-five years on

In the clear, sunny September air,

on a date chosen specifically

to instill fear in the collective psyche,

the great twin towers

stood like tall pines that had never known the axe.

Then they fell.

Not the slow, ragged way a tree gives itself to wind and time,

but straight down,

clean,

as if the roots had been cut all at once from within.

And the third building,

untouched by any plane,

folded a few hours later like paper

into its own shadow

at the speed of falling that only explosives

or the will of gravity fully released can know.

The sky that morning held no answering wings.

The interceptors stayed in their nests.

Somewhere far below,

the war mongers moved their quiet pieces around the board.

A year earlier those same men

had written of a new Pearl Harbor,

a necessary tempest to open the doors

they could not open with ordinary keys.

Later the official commission pages came,

thick as winter,

leaving out the sound of the many explosions,

the molten metal still glowing in the dark,

the free-fall that physics alone cannot explain.

But I walked the long path of what was omitted.

I gathered the small stones of testimony.

Firemen who heard the building speak in sudden bursts,

the dust that held more than concrete.

What entered the light that ordinary morning

was not only fire and the collective grief of strangers.

Something older,

more deliberate,

moved through the steel and the story that day.

Sinister and cunning in its agenda,

just as a cornered rattlesnake.

The questions remain to this day,

patient and relentless as any wild thing

that will not be named or tamed too quickly.

I do not turn away.

I keep looking

until the true shape of the falling begins,

at last,

to be seen.

And in that seeing,

the lies will finally be revealed.

Spoken aloud for all the world to hear.

Like cicadas on a hot summer night.

And we will awaken,

like the butterfly from its chrysalis.

The truth will break our hearts,

and maybe,

just maybe,

set us free,

like the last breath of a glacier

before it calves into the sea.