Thanks for your decency and hard work, Candice. Happy holiday.
WTC
These died, in any case …
- Pound
Let the hucksters work
the edges of the crowd;
they're quiet, their money small and innocent.
The flag they sell, on every kind of shirt,
pin, purse, with occasionally a roused
eagle,
will be the only metaphor.
The shops along the narrow streets,
now ending half a block
from Broadway, are going out of business -
"after ten years," their signs announce
above cheap luggage, cellphones, replicas
of Liberty;
they thank "the community."
Those windows have been cleaned,
but ten feet up - and up and up -
a purplish paste
composed of paper, stone, and people
wraps every floor.
The smell venturi-ing from the crater
in the warm fall wind
is the smell inside something.
Traffic has stopped; one of the hoses is leaking.
Visiting firemen
from Jacksonville and Portland
in their dress uniforms
move purposefully, grimly,
yet also barely move.
For the crowd is as thick
as the flowers it lays,
the names it signs, the words it writes
on sheets that hang from the fences,
and no one wants to be here or to leave;
even the intellectual
who for the first time
feels, with a double horror,
what it is to belong and to believe.
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