wondering

Knowing that there are many more profound stories that we honor today...I humbly offer my own thoughts...

On this date, ten years ago, our children were not let off the school bus at the end of the day unless a parent was waiting for them at the bus stop. No one wanted kids in our town to go home to a house where parents might never show up. A member of our church at the time lost two sons in the towers. There were cars waiting in the parking lot at the local train station, whose owners never returned. Some folks from town were on the planes. Our oldest, in college in the midwest, tried over and over again to call, to see if Batman had gone in to the city for an appointment that day. All phone circuits were busy. I woke at night, with the taste of fear in my mouth, as the low flying fighter jets rattled our windows.

I understood the bitter anger and outrage that filled our neighborhoods but it made me uncomfortable. Instead, I was deeply and profoundly sad that our place in the world had come to this...senseless and brutal violence. I was adrift for days. It wasn't until Saturday, September 15, 2001, that I let myself fall apart. When I heard Scott Simon read this aloud on Weekend Edition on National Public Radio, my throat tightened and the tears welled.

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

-from The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney

cited here.

A new life at its term. A new world at its term. Ten years later, I am wondering...are we building it?


my post in 2010
my post in 2009