Why I Wrote “The Saddest September”
We are approaching another anniversary of the infamous 9/11/ attack on the United States of America. I remember a sense of unreality on that dreadful and grim day. The horror brought home in the most painful way how much some people – a group rightly designated by the term “Islamo-fascists†– hated my country.
This initial feeling of unreality at the sheer hideousness of the destruction and the depth of the hatred was followed by concern for people I care about who lived in the areas directly assaulted. Luckily, no one I knew had been killed or even injured. One friend in New York City told me that his neighborhood was filled with dust and debris. Another said he had seen the planes crash into the World Trade Center from his window.
A friend who is retired from the U.S. Air Force told me that he had lost a friend in the crash into the Pentagon.
I remember seeing people around me with grim looks on their faces. A woman who lived in my apartment complex said, “I can’t stop crying when I think of all those poor people who got killed.†I also remember how flag symbols seemed to sprout on people’s apparel and elsewhere as this injury to America awakened a fierce sense of patriotism in its citizens.
9/11 reminded me of a tragedy that the United States had suffered when I was an elementary school-aged child. When I got home from school, I found my mother sobbing.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?†I asked.
“Somebody killed President Kennedy,†she replied as she wept.
My mother is and was a very conservative Republican so I’m pretty sure that she hadn’t voted for JFK. However, like most people in the U.S., she was plunged into grief by his assassination. The murder of America’s president was felt as an attack on the nation. Americans suffered something similar in an earlier era when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
A little while after 9/11, I wrote the following poem. I would be most interested to learn what readers think of it.
The Saddest September
By
Denise Noe
The Twin Towers thrust through the skies,
Testaments to ages of intelligence,
Fulfilled by engineering’s mute eloquence.
Together, the World Trade Center of
Commerce: sell, buy, and advertise,
Gloriously, all of the above.
Then: the planes of malice crashing
Thousands of precious human lives smashing.
Watching from the safety of our living rooms
We saw the Twin Towers turned into grim tombs
Delicate membranes, our eyes stung in sympathy
As if seared and scorched by the fire through the TV
To realize that we are a people fated
To be by fanatics so implacably hated.
How our pained souls did quiver and quake!
Even as our resolve did awake.
Knowing that we will forever remember,
The trauma of this, the saddest September.
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