Everyday Canvas

there will be no forgetting

Prompt: 9-11. Write a poem or something about 9-11.

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there will be no forgetting
not just those four puny planes
nineteen evil criminals with ill will
toward our ways, our structures
and their hatred still brewing

but the valor of the brave
with heroic acts of service,
under tragic uncertainty,
with kindness and sacrifice
nurtured with affection

with justice and tenderness for
what we all stand for
with their names etched
on stone and in our hearts
there will be no forgetting

----


On 9/11


It was the worst thing that could happen, the worst thing in my lifetime.

My older son was working in some place downtown. They had offered him a job in Deutche Bank in one of the twin towers. He turned it down. We thought he was being foolish because it would have been a promotion. He said he just didn't have a good feeling about it. In hindsight, I guess it was his sixth sense or whatever. He lives on Long Island. On 9/11, when the first plane hit, he was just getting out of the train.

My husband and I saw it on CNBC. Sue Herera was talking. She said something is happening in downtown, and they turned the cameras to the window behind her. Then we saw the first plane half in and half out of the building, I called my son's cell. He was trying to get to work, but people were going the wrong way. He said no one knew what was happening. I told him not to go to work and that there was some kind of a danger. So he walked with everyone uptown and ended in a cafe around Columbia University, in the meantime, periodically talking with us on his cell. He said that people were saying we are being attacked and maybe it would be the third World War. There were all kinds of stories going on, he said and no one really knew what was happening. We became his only news source. Toward the evening, the LIRR opened. We told him to take the train and go back home, and he did.

After that, he was greatly traumatized. He left his job and tried to work in several other places part time. Then, for a long time, years in fact, he couldn't work. Only lately, he's picking himself up. He didn't go for help or anything, either. We helped him because he refused to take government money. But his is nothing compared to what happened to us the USA citizens that day. We lost our trust, our innocence, in other people.

To this day, I can't erase from my mind what I saw on the TV screen. I can't ever forget.