TO THE TUNE OF CHESTER:

One Year (H. D. Miller, September 20, 2002, Travelling Shoes)

September 11, 2002
I woke up this morning angry, as angry as I've been in nearly a year.

I was in Manhattan on that morning a year ago, well uptown and away from the carnage and mayhem, yet close enough to smell the electrical fire and see the smoke, close enough to stand among the silent and shocked pedestrians walking home from their offices downtown. We, the uptown people, stood on the street and let the survivors, weary and footsore from a hundred block march, pass us by like a routed army.

But routed the city wasn't; the civilians had walked slowly uptown, while the firemen and cops had raced down, rushing to fill the breach, to plug, with their own bodies, the gaping hole torn in the wall of civilization. We weren't beaten, just shocked and scared and reeling from the first blow.

Above all from that day, the memory of the near complete silence of the city is still the clearest.

Let tyrants shake their iron rods
And slav'ry clank her galling chains
We'll fear them not...
H. D. Miller is back from a too long hiatus. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 22, 2002 8:18 AM