From Romantic Revolution Books, this evening...
My New York After 9/11
Busy in my own small city,
My happy fraction of this place
Improbable and real, I pause
Where chance of angles frames a space.
More palpable than any shape,
This absence on a futile blue
Arrests my steps--as always, now--
As sudden thought, half-grasped, will do.
They called to all the best in us,
To aspiration. Who knew, oh,
How they were fragile as the hope
For what we now shall never know:
Some future, immolated there,
With just that cunning savagery
Of men too small for us to hate.
We are left to loathe mere history.
Today's impartial sun finds no
Reflection, now, and I can give
No more than my possessive love,
Which is so like a will to live.
--Walter Donway
