THE NAMES

A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.
by Billy Collins, Former Poet Laureate of the US...the last part read by former New York governor Pataki

(**It would be difficult to comprehend, but it was said many years ago, by a Great Bay friend of Berry Berenson Perkins, that a wrist bangle belonging to her was found in the rubble, after the plane in which Berry was flying, was crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. We cling to our memories, no matter how molten!)

YOUTUBE LINK: Paul Simon-The Sound of Silence 9/11 Ground Zero
www.youtube.com/watch?v=isL0GTnbemU

DIRGE WITHOUT MUSIC
BY Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

LINK:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmJ2BW3yaWY

RIP, Berry and so many others.

"IF YOU FORGET ME": Madonna Reciting Pablo Neruda

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f88n8eQCGvs&feature=related

We are advised that the largest human-made waterfalls, in the world, were created for the Memorial at New York's Sacred Ground Zero, in the footprints of a World Trade Center towers.
It is reported that rainbows regularly appear in the spray of the Falls ("Fall-en").

Architect Michael Arad's design, "Reflecting Absence", features waterfalls cascading into reflecting pools where the towers stood. The names of all those killed on Sept. 11, 2001 and in the earlier World Trade Center attack on Feb. 26, 1993, are inscribed on bronze parapets surrounding the waterfalls.

And then the visitors come to the edge and start circling the pools, "following this river of names" around the perimeter.

Placement of the nearly 3,000 victims' names was always contentious.

An alphabetical list "would not have been the right move," Arad said. "You had married families who shared the same last name and married families who didn't share the same last name. And if you did an alphabetical listing it would privilege some over others."
The solution was to group people's names near the names of their friends, family members and co-workers, and first responders were identified. Over 1,200 requests were made, and granted to list the names.

Families who died on the airplanes will be listed together, as will office colleagues who shared lunch every day.

Donald James McIntyre, a Port Authority police officer who died as he tried to make his way to the 84th floor of the south tower, will be listed next to his cousin John Anthony Sherry, who worked there.

The waterfall-filled pools are the centerpiece of a memorial plaza that will take up half of the 16-acre site at ground zero. The pools will be surrounded by hundreds of sweetgum and swamp white oak trees (growing up to 60 feet) on a cobblestoned plaza...visitors will look down on them from street level. A low wall covered by bronze panels inscribed with nearly 3,000 victims’ names will surround the pools.

Both the waterfalls and the name panels will be backlit at night, giving them a glow that will reinforce “the memorial is about the absence of the 2,982 people that were lost.”

Michael Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” Memorial at Ground Zero.
The architect saw the waterfalls — which will empty into huge reflecting pools set above the spots where the towers once stood.

"These voids that you see behind me — as you approach them as a pedestrian they're not readily visible. And it's really only when you're a few feet away from them that all of a sudden the ground opens up in front of you and you see this enormous expanse, these voids which are ringed with these waterfalls and the reflecting pool below them."

“One of the things I wanted the water and the design to do is to mark this continuous sense of absence. These voids, even though water falls into them ... they never fill up, they always remain empty, and that was very important to me.”

“I’m hoping the sound of the water will create a sense of place and being somewhat buffered from the city beyond while still being firmly within it creating an environment that is conducive to contemplation in the middle of the city.”
Architect Michael Arad (Designer of the Waterfalls for the World Trade Center Memorial

PHOTOS OF THE NATIONAL SEPTEMBER 11TH MEMORIAL:
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035883/9-11-Anniversary-Ground-Zero-Memorial-r evealed-pictures-1st-time.html

Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon & Garfunkel)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYw_d6bws3s&feature=related

Beyond Grief and Grievance: The Poetry of 9/11 and its Aftermath by Philip Metres

What was 9/11 but the end of the fantasy of our separateness, our invulnerability?

The events of 9/11 occasioned a tremendous outpouring of poetry; people in New York taped poems on windows, wheatpasted them on posts, and shared them by hand. In Curtis Fox's words, "poetry was suddenly everywhere in the city." Outside the immediate radius of what became known as "ground zero," aided by email, listserves, websites, and, later, blogs, thousands of people also shared poems they loved, and poems they had written. By February, 2002, over 25,000 poems written in response to 9/11 had been published on poems.com alone. Three years later, the number of poems there had more than doubled.

Often invisible in American culture, poetry suddenly became relevant, even-and perhaps dangerously-useful. People turned to poems when other forms failed to give shape to their feelings. Some of these poems, certainly, employed the language of faith, a faith that has often been mobilized as a weapon of grievance. Some were desperately angry...

...The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 compelled me to rethink everything I thought I knew, and made me want to learn more, to read outside whatever borders I had created for myself.
Not to be more American, but to be a better citizen, a better denizen of the planet. To go global and be local, to go ancient and be modern, to question all certainties and embrace what I did not know, to read Rumi and Isaiah, Rushdie and Roy and even Al-Qaeda, to listen to Springsteen and Kulthum, to refuse the elixir of fundamentalisms, to translate and be translated again by what I could not yet understand. To tattoo "Oye" on my body. To listen.

A Sample:
Martín Espada's "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100," ...offers a globalist ode to the workers on the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center who perished in the attacks. By focusing on people often unnoticed, sometimes undocumented, and occasionally disparaged, Espada celebrates the diverse gathering of humanity that the American project has enabled, and that the attacks threatened to separate, in the rhetoric of security and the ideology of fear.

...Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans...

LINK:
www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/09/911-poetry_n_954492.html?page=1

I was there last weekend for my annual pilgrimage with my daughter to say a prayer for our dear friend Berry. It is no longer the construction site of memorials past. The memory pools are lovely, and the newly planted trees are as well. This is now a nice, peaceful place filled with hope for those who continue to grieve lost friends and family.

The "One World Trade Centre" building now towers above several other surrounding buildings. There is hope and heartbeat in the air of Lower Manhattan again.

The World will never forget.

An Impressive Memorial::Two Stark Voids...In A City of Life

LINK:
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/review-911-memorial-in-new-york/2011/08/0 4/gIQARXETgJ_story.html