by Mel Waldman
We stopped searching years ago after dreams were obliterated
during our metamorphosis, when darkness came to us and
swallowed our light, and we gazed into the broken mirrors of
our shattered souls and saw only shadows-nothing human.
We lost much, especially our innocence, and after the devastating
emptiness, we were filled with something familiar but alien-
emerging from our darkest dreamscape.
We stopped searching years ago and some no longer asked: “Where
are the other human remains?”
The recovery effort ceased. And reconstruction began above sacred
ground, where ghostly secrets were buried in the catacombs of ground
zero.
Yet now, when hundreds of human remains have been discovered, we
must question why we stopped.
What is more horrific: that we now know terror or that in this intimate
knowledge of evil, we stopped searching for our own?
What discovery shall we make, when looking back, we see the Void of
human omission?
And if we are offered redemption again, in a second metamorphosis,
somewhere in tomorrow’s treacherous landscape, shall we search the
catacombs of our souls and never stop, or shall we fail again, when
facing evil, giving up before the final discovery?
Dr. Mel Waldman is a poet, writer, artist, and singer/songwriter. His stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews and commercial magazines including Happy, Sweet Annie Press, Children, Churches and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, New Thought Journal, The Brooklyn Literary Review, Hardboiled Detective, Detective Story Magazine, Espionage, and The Saint. He is a past winner of the literary Gradiva Award in Psychoanalysis and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, American Mensa, Ltd., and the American Psychological Association. Who Killed the Heartbreak Kid?, a mystery novel, was published by iUniverse in February 2006. It can be purchased at www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/, www.bn.com, at www.amazon.com, and other online bookstores or through local bookstores. Recently, some of his poems have appeared online in The Jerusalem Post.