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Poetry > Plays > Projects
Alice Shapiro
Alice Shapiro
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2:55 m
Threnody for the Survivors of September 11, 2001
By Ray Sharp
(written September 2009)
The angel of death flew on silver wings.
Strange solitary birds clad in dark feathers
Tumbled through the bright blue sky.
A blizzard of confetti—scraps of lives
Torn asunder—swirled on air currents stirred
By three thousand souls, or by their absence.
Tall towers slumped and crashed earthward,
Their steel bones and skin of glass melted and
Crushed by the inevitability of gravity that pulls
Us to the grave. Now, eight years hence,
The rescuers who breathed the fine particles
Of pulvered lives are falling to the same rare cancer
I came to know when it took my father two years ago.
Were the silent seeds of sickness already
Planted in him so far away on that fateful day?
I scattered my father's ashes on a desert hilltop
To which I may never return. In wind and rain
And blazing heat they will join with the soil
That gives life anew. In living there comes pain
And grief, but in death may we find comfort.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Copyright © 2009 by Ray Sharp
Pushcart nominee by voxpoetica.com, Annmarie Lockhart, Editor.
http://raysharp.wordpress.com and http://www.inknode.com/people/raysharp.
.
By Ray Sharp
(written September 2009)
The angel of death flew on silver wings.
Strange solitary birds clad in dark feathers
Tumbled through the bright blue sky.
A blizzard of confetti—scraps of lives
Torn asunder—swirled on air currents stirred
By three thousand souls, or by their absence.
Tall towers slumped and crashed earthward,
Their steel bones and skin of glass melted and
Crushed by the inevitability of gravity that pulls
Us to the grave. Now, eight years hence,
The rescuers who breathed the fine particles
Of pulvered lives are falling to the same rare cancer
I came to know when it took my father two years ago.
Were the silent seeds of sickness already
Planted in him so far away on that fateful day?
I scattered my father's ashes on a desert hilltop
To which I may never return. In wind and rain
And blazing heat they will join with the soil
That gives life anew. In living there comes pain
And grief, but in death may we find comfort.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Copyright © 2009 by Ray Sharp
Pushcart nominee by voxpoetica.com, Annmarie Lockhart, Editor.
http://raysharp.wordpress.com and http://www.inknode.com/people/raysharp.
.
Ray Sharp lives in the rural, rugged and remote Western Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near Lake Superior. A public health administrator, he takes his poetic inspiration from the region’s woods, water and abundant snow, and from his background studying Spanish literature. His recent poems have been featured at voxpoetica.com, caperjournal.com, and in Eclectic Flash. You can see more of Sharp’s writing at inknode.com and raysharp.wordpress.com