Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
Martin Espada
for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center
Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
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.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.
Poem Therapy at 3:47 P.M: Going to Work - Nancy Mercado
Going To Work
Nancy Mercado
On their daily trips
Commuters shed tears now
Use American flags
Like veiled women
To hide their sorrows
Rush to buy throwaway cameras
To capture your twin ghosts
Frantically I too
Purchase your memory
On post cards & coffee mugs
In New York City souvenir shops
Afraid I’ll forget your façade
Forget my hallowed Sunday
Morning Path Train rides
My subway travels through
The center of your belly
Afraid I’ll forget your power
To transform helicopters
Into ladybugs gliding in the air
To turn New York City
Into a breathing map
To display the curvature
Of our world
For the Ironworkers
The ironworkers came
Stacked with tools
In the naked night
A night devoid of grace
Devoid of warmth
They arrived
Weighed down with
Giant surgical instruments
Hauling them through rubble
Like cattle climbing canyons
The ironworkers toiled
For nights and days
Sunken in a mass of debris
In a sweltering heat
In the smell of death
They worked to dismember
What remained of the tallest towers
On the earth
They labored to burry
What they had given birth to.
Toward The Towers
Seagulls fly slowly in the haze
Build friendships with Staten Island Ferry riders
Making us laugh at their kooky grins
At their little plump bodies airborne by the boat
They seem motionless, dangling
A muggy cool breeze clings to my skin
Clings to the icy metal of the John F. Kennedy Ferry
Leisurely we glide toward Manhattan
The clearing fog reveals your absence.
A Perfect Day In Progress
Looking Up
On this day clouds were on vacation
Leaving our skies opened
Glory was everywhere
The sun generously embraced us
Even inside gloom-ridden city crevices
Its light rested
Frantic
Voices pierced through
The car radio
Gnarled human racket
Sirens bending in the wind
Crashing glass bellowed
Before incomprehension lifts
To reveal the many bloodied voices
I must phone Puerto Rico
Stunned
My descent into the student lounge
Is like a sluggish desert crossing
I see the mystified
Cringing in the sitting room
Looking to hide the day
Eyes relentlessly collect around
Television monitors that throb
Shock
On the tube
His slender body slowly caves
I run out of the lounge
Into the open sky
Dragging my jaw behind
Disbelief
Witnesses are called
To confirm the bright sun
The blue firmament
The warm September day
What just happened
The question bobs in
Street puddles of tears
Silence
One tower stands alone
Everyone
Waits
Desperation
We all searched the sprawling heavens
Investigated our neighbor’s face
Hope made tracks
Off to some hidden place
We want to follow
To travel through that hole
To arrive at yesterday
Grief
I cannot control the airplanes
The bombs
The guns
The poison
Comprehension
The Twenty-first Century
War engine revs-up
Humanity obsesses in its
Shortsighted lunacy for Now
We trash the natural world
For shopping sprees
For control over veiled grandmothers
For imaginary star rank
Become obese with consumer jingles
Binge on religious claptrap
Trick ourselves into buying
The delusion that we are better
Than the next poor bastard
Nancy Mercado
On their daily trips
Commuters shed tears now
Use American flags
Like veiled women
To hide their sorrows
Rush to buy throwaway cameras
To capture your twin ghosts
Frantically I too
Purchase your memory
On post cards & coffee mugs
In New York City souvenir shops
Afraid I’ll forget your façade
Forget my hallowed Sunday
Morning Path Train rides
My subway travels through
The center of your belly
Afraid I’ll forget your power
To transform helicopters
Into ladybugs gliding in the air
To turn New York City
Into a breathing map
To display the curvature
Of our world
For the Ironworkers
The ironworkers came
Stacked with tools
In the naked night
A night devoid of grace
Devoid of warmth
They arrived
Weighed down with
Giant surgical instruments
Hauling them through rubble
Like cattle climbing canyons
The ironworkers toiled
For nights and days
Sunken in a mass of debris
In a sweltering heat
In the smell of death
They worked to dismember
What remained of the tallest towers
On the earth
They labored to burry
What they had given birth to.
Toward The Towers
Seagulls fly slowly in the haze
Build friendships with Staten Island Ferry riders
Making us laugh at their kooky grins
At their little plump bodies airborne by the boat
They seem motionless, dangling
A muggy cool breeze clings to my skin
Clings to the icy metal of the John F. Kennedy Ferry
Leisurely we glide toward Manhattan
The clearing fog reveals your absence.
A Perfect Day In Progress
Looking Up
On this day clouds were on vacation
Leaving our skies opened
Glory was everywhere
The sun generously embraced us
Even inside gloom-ridden city crevices
Its light rested
Frantic
Voices pierced through
The car radio
Gnarled human racket
Sirens bending in the wind
Crashing glass bellowed
Before incomprehension lifts
To reveal the many bloodied voices
I must phone Puerto Rico
Stunned
My descent into the student lounge
Is like a sluggish desert crossing
I see the mystified
Cringing in the sitting room
Looking to hide the day
Eyes relentlessly collect around
Television monitors that throb
Shock
On the tube
His slender body slowly caves
I run out of the lounge
Into the open sky
Dragging my jaw behind
Disbelief
Witnesses are called
To confirm the bright sun
The blue firmament
The warm September day
What just happened
The question bobs in
Street puddles of tears
Silence
One tower stands alone
Everyone
Waits
Desperation
We all searched the sprawling heavens
Investigated our neighbor’s face
Hope made tracks
Off to some hidden place
We want to follow
To travel through that hole
To arrive at yesterday
Grief
I cannot control the airplanes
The bombs
The guns
The poison
Comprehension
The Twenty-first Century
War engine revs-up
Humanity obsesses in its
Shortsighted lunacy for Now
We trash the natural world
For shopping sprees
For control over veiled grandmothers
For imaginary star rank
Become obese with consumer jingles
Binge on religious claptrap
Trick ourselves into buying
The delusion that we are better
Than the next poor bastard
This Moment: September 11, 2011 7:17 A.M.
I woke from a dream of Ancient Persia. I can't remember specifics, but now I am visualizing the ruins of Persepolis, the magnificent city Alexander the Great reduced to rubble as retribution. Blood lust, I remember feeling this. The Code of Hammurabi and the Old Testament's eye for an eye.I am lying on new sheets, softer than any in recent memory. A small luxury. It is silent save for the white noise of a plane overhead. I opened the French doors to let in the season's crisp air, and the quiet static of the trees which sound like ocean waves advancing and retreating the shore. Now that I am fully awake it is impossible to stay in this moment. I remember the eerie silence after the unimaginable roar of the collapse, the city covered in ash, the sky littered with paper. And later, the streets lined with people holding images of the missing, their faces a collective Greek mask of anguish, their eyes so desperate and hopeful I couldn't hold their gaze and turned away, knowing full well they were on television. The small dog scratches his chin with his hind leg, then stands and stretches, dragging his hind quarters for one, two, three steps. He pads out of my bedroom into the living room and I hear his nails on the hardwood and then the kitchen tile. He returns to join the older dog on the rug and commences grooming. I watch the occasional cars pass and wonder about the drivers and their thoughts. A train signals it's arrival with a loud blast, and now is a comforting sound of business as usual heading down the tracks to some impossible future.
Remembering 9/11
History is personal. All of us place ourselves, our stories, at the center. No matter how small, how obliquely relative. This is my story.
I didn't listen to the news on the way to work that morning. I was well into the work morning when the calls came. Because of the nature of my work, I ignored the first call, but answered the second. It was my sister, asking if I was watching television. Of course I wasn't, I was working. She told me to turn on the television, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I couldn't understand what she was telling me.
It had been exactly one month and a day to the day that my mother had had an aneurysm and subsequent stroke, coincidentally on my wedding day, and I had been functioning under a thick sheet of ice ever since, so my sister's phone call, the hour of her call, the tone of her voice, didn't set off an alarm. I remember after hanging up I went immediately to my computer to MSNBC, which was down due to overload, then a handful of news sites, which were also inundated, so I went to a colleague's office, packed with other coworkers, and we watched the unimaginable.
I didn't feel like it was a movie or a dream or unreality. It didn't feel like anything I could place in any context at all. It didn't occur to me that anyone I knew, intimately or generally could be involved in any of this. Of course I was wrong. Their stories are theirs to tell.
The first call I placed was to the only person in my family that could possibly be in the towers or the city. My brother. So I called him. He was in California. The second call was to my sister who was at the hospital with our mother to tell her to tell the nurses not to say anything, to keep the television off. My daughter was in Phoenix staying with her best friend at her uncle's home. He called and left a message that the girls were okay and that my daughter was making crayon drawings. The three drawings she made during this time are among my favorite, especially the large-headed girl with a crow flying in the distance flanked by a large plane. The mother of my daughter's friend drove to Phoenix and brought the girls home.
I don't know if I checked the Onion News Network site that day, or during the days following the attacks, but I know reading their articles, I smiled. And laughed. The interview with Muhammed Atta in Hell was especially stress-relieving. And inexplicably an image of America with a giant red bullseye covering the entirety with the caption, Holy F...ing Shit! Humor is a curious and revealing thing in terrible times.
For many years I met with a writing group at the Sugar House Barnes and Noble. I called the group to see if we were still meeting and everyone decided to go ahead. When we all arrived, the bookstore was closed, so we headed to a local sports bar. Of course we didn't talk about our writing. We hugged and held onto each other's hands. Instead of sporting events, the burning towers and the people jumping from them was on the large screens. I couldn't watch. One particular woman from our group, a petite blond with light blue eyes, watched with a type of fascination, squinting her eyes. I remember thinking what an icy bitch. I still can't watch the people falling.
Later that night, sitting on the couch watching television with my sister at my parent's home, my father sleeping upstairs, a plane flew low over the house, enough to shake the living room chandelier. We raced outside to watch it. Hill Air Force Base is to the north of my bedroom town, and what I learned later was that the plane was flying reconnaissance to California and back.
For the next few months, my fear was that the local base would be a target. I couldn't stop myself from thinking of something my father told me of a childhood waking dream. He's a tangible man, he must touch something to believe it, so after all these years he is still trying to make sense of what he and his brother saw. He and his brother were on top of the chicken coop when they saw a bright light break and catch fire to the north. He said they saw fences and metal posts melt like wax, trees burst like struck matches. And then they saw the scorched remains. Both swear they saw this, although at the time the base was nothing more than farmland.
I've spent the weekend watchting the memorials, from Paul McCartney's tribute to Time Magazine's. I am filled with hope for a better world.
I didn't listen to the news on the way to work that morning. I was well into the work morning when the calls came. Because of the nature of my work, I ignored the first call, but answered the second. It was my sister, asking if I was watching television. Of course I wasn't, I was working. She told me to turn on the television, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I couldn't understand what she was telling me.
It had been exactly one month and a day to the day that my mother had had an aneurysm and subsequent stroke, coincidentally on my wedding day, and I had been functioning under a thick sheet of ice ever since, so my sister's phone call, the hour of her call, the tone of her voice, didn't set off an alarm. I remember after hanging up I went immediately to my computer to MSNBC, which was down due to overload, then a handful of news sites, which were also inundated, so I went to a colleague's office, packed with other coworkers, and we watched the unimaginable.
I didn't feel like it was a movie or a dream or unreality. It didn't feel like anything I could place in any context at all. It didn't occur to me that anyone I knew, intimately or generally could be involved in any of this. Of course I was wrong. Their stories are theirs to tell.
The first call I placed was to the only person in my family that could possibly be in the towers or the city. My brother. So I called him. He was in California. The second call was to my sister who was at the hospital with our mother to tell her to tell the nurses not to say anything, to keep the television off. My daughter was in Phoenix staying with her best friend at her uncle's home. He called and left a message that the girls were okay and that my daughter was making crayon drawings. The three drawings she made during this time are among my favorite, especially the large-headed girl with a crow flying in the distance flanked by a large plane. The mother of my daughter's friend drove to Phoenix and brought the girls home.
I don't know if I checked the Onion News Network site that day, or during the days following the attacks, but I know reading their articles, I smiled. And laughed. The interview with Muhammed Atta in Hell was especially stress-relieving. And inexplicably an image of America with a giant red bullseye covering the entirety with the caption, Holy F...ing Shit! Humor is a curious and revealing thing in terrible times.
For many years I met with a writing group at the Sugar House Barnes and Noble. I called the group to see if we were still meeting and everyone decided to go ahead. When we all arrived, the bookstore was closed, so we headed to a local sports bar. Of course we didn't talk about our writing. We hugged and held onto each other's hands. Instead of sporting events, the burning towers and the people jumping from them was on the large screens. I couldn't watch. One particular woman from our group, a petite blond with light blue eyes, watched with a type of fascination, squinting her eyes. I remember thinking what an icy bitch. I still can't watch the people falling.
Later that night, sitting on the couch watching television with my sister at my parent's home, my father sleeping upstairs, a plane flew low over the house, enough to shake the living room chandelier. We raced outside to watch it. Hill Air Force Base is to the north of my bedroom town, and what I learned later was that the plane was flying reconnaissance to California and back.
For the next few months, my fear was that the local base would be a target. I couldn't stop myself from thinking of something my father told me of a childhood waking dream. He's a tangible man, he must touch something to believe it, so after all these years he is still trying to make sense of what he and his brother saw. He and his brother were on top of the chicken coop when they saw a bright light break and catch fire to the north. He said they saw fences and metal posts melt like wax, trees burst like struck matches. And then they saw the scorched remains. Both swear they saw this, although at the time the base was nothing more than farmland.
I've spent the weekend watchting the memorials, from Paul McCartney's tribute to Time Magazine's. I am filled with hope for a better world.
This Moment - September 10, 2011
A train sounds as if it is drunk and staggering along the rails this morning. My ankle's small twinges announce a coming storm. Suddenly, the dogs are up and in battle mode, barking warnings at a passing truck. The small dog perches on my lower legs, his hind leg kicking the comforter. From the side windows I see the peach tree bowed under the weight of it's fruit. Roses and geraniums hold the last blooms on their stems, and yet the tomatoes still are green-hued. The small dog smells like a dog. Even so, I bring my face to his and allow him his morning ritual. Soon, he will bring me his pink bear to throw and once he has tired of the game he will whine to be let out to chase doves off the lawn and into the trees. The older dog's rituals are hers and from what I can decipher, involve discovering the nature of trespassers that crossed territory during the night. She only asks I open the door, then returns when she is finished to nose my calves as we walk back into the house. Both wait for me to complete my waking rituals, and for me to grab their leashes and head for the door again. For now I am back on the bed. Cars roll by. Leaves are just beginning to fall. Very soon the lawn will be covered. But not yet. My eyes are turned backwards, holding to what was, what might have been. I know that very soon I will have to let it all go, and like the trees, wait for new growth.
Artist of the Day: National September 11 Memorial - Michael Arad
Poem Therapy September 9, 2011, 2:24 P.M. : Photograph from September 11 - Wislawa Szymborska
September 11, 2001.Photograph from September 11
Wislawa Szymborska
They jumped from the burning floors--
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.
The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.
Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.
There's enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.
They're still within the air's reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.
I can do only two things for them--
describe this flight
and not add a last line.
A colleague used the German word weltschmerz when the the anniversary of September 11 came up over lunch. She said it means world grief or world sorrow. Answers.com defined weltschmerz as sadness over the evils of the world, especially as an expression of romantic pessimism.
I can't say I have the words to express the terror and outrage and grief of the day, the aftershock, the new reality, nor the consequences thereof for the last decade.
I have my own small memories.
And, I am grateful the poet did not add a last line.
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