Impossibly clear, painfully blue.
So much sun, the perfect morning,
then all changed irrevocably.
Humanity raining from the sky,
down to the bedrock,
down to the Hudson’s slurry wall.
Your lives now confetti.
22 years later I regard the bloody eye
of tangled and twisted steel,
the fraught echoes of last calls home.
There is no light 70 feet below ground,
in this place,
where we will always remember you.
Bagpipe music pumped in,
Amazing Grace, how sweet the contrariety.
I take my sandals off.
root into the bedrock,
my small white hand pressed to your tomb.
2,977 lives.
No day will erase you from the memory of time.
Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.
