I'd like to share a little poetry with you today, before the return of John and normality.

SEPTEMBER 11 2001

It is possible to live within the culture of war for so long
that the end of a particular war seems like the end of
all violent political struggle, and the temporay quiet that
follows seems to promise a perpetual, peaceful and
exhausted statis.
Philip Bobbitt “The Shield of Achilles”

Then –

Our world was a tower with a strong steel spine.
We had a panoramic view of victory marches:
they stretched along the boulevards of time,
fun-loving souls sprawled on all our couches.

The hour of bliss was ours to the far extent:
a giggle or two at the silliness of life,
a hot tomato whose full lips held a president.
Noise that overwhelmed the grinding of a knife.

Now –

This dawn of wrath, new deaths are born prodigious.
Lives fall like raindrops on the street so far below.
Monster-martyrs-victims mixed in the same storm:

those who aimed so well to die, those who died
and didn’t know they’d gone, those cast away
on a steel reef with no boat to bring them home.

Huddled gasping mass, a mile up in the sky
drowned with ash of lives, hot hate dust of history.

Could they know what courses led to this,
and whisper prayers to the futile god they chose?

No time.

The spine is melted

sheer blister crack

we fall...

MURPH