melissaahowells

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Oh What Fine Physics (Before Me ,Lies) re-edtited @4/17/2023

If Prejudice Were Dumb And Could Not Speak

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the falling man  (or the man who could fly)



this is so hard

I like to dream big dreams
don't you?
we're Americans
right...
so, does that mean something,
anything at all, to you?

maybe it does,
maybe it doesn't.
in the 70's, they built a spiral twin cathedral
up into the sky.
almost like we were telling the world
hey, we can touch the face of God.
look out we are 110 stories high.
this is the tale where...
American glory and ingenuity never end.
never say never again.
no, never.

with a spine spun of steel and made to last.
it was Mid-Manhattan's super skyscraper Mecca.
until one September morn two twin towers
became two twin pyres. oh what a bonfire.
God could see this one now all the way from heaven.
and we saw it everywhere on television.

and see how the American dream girl goes up in flame.
that, in part, that was only just a part of the pain.
but the worst was the horror.


why is it Americans are not supposed to scream?
nor flail nor fail
nor fall nor leap?

we are supposed to be the brothers and sisters of faith.
we are supposed to be the doers, the ones that over-come.
but on that day, we  became the ones undone.
it was hard to be heroic. noble. among the terror.

I remember the man who jumped
and seemed to fall for the longest time...
and how I covered my mouth
and no sound came out
and how my eyes squeezed closed
and all those tears poured out.

and there was a couple who held
hands and jumped too.
and there were others waving at the top
of the building waiting for their rescue
but
that would never come.

200 plus souls.

All Americans. All-Americans.

never mind that the official New York coroner's report
read for that day, that those 200 plus souls were
expelled out of the building in some way...they weren't.
they jumped. they fell. they died.
each individual making their own final decision to fly
as we watched...on street corners, on television
at home, in our offices.

no New York coroner's report can change these cold hard facts.

my heart breaks or them all. especially for the falling man
whose picture has become so notorious and was labeled distasteful
and unheroic.

he is heroic to me. he made the only decision possible for
himself under the worst possible circumstances. I see him
momentarily suspended in the ether of the camera lens.
the entire world is there to examine him. we don't let him go.
we judge him. yet, he's suspended there gracefully in mid-air
like some odd ballet. but it is not ballet. he will be dead
in a blink of an eye. but he needs to be remembered always.

I can't turn away from this. the false idea of what it means
to be American and heroic. if Father Mychal Judge were still living
he'd give the falling man his last rites. A hero's rites.

I can't comfort him. I wonder if the falling man is somehow aware
of a world consciousness, of all of us thinking of him beyond the grave?
and is he at peace now? or is he in limbo? suspended like in the photograph?
like Marilyn Monroe...hounded somehow, because of our perpetual curiosity about him?

when they built the World Trade Center they might  have been
trying to touch the face of God. I hope the falling man lept into air
and found the arms of God to catch him somewhere as he fell

I want the Creator to bless him.


Copyright September 11 , 2014/All Rights Are Reserved By This Author
Melissa A Howells/ this has been percolating in my head for several days now
Meloo/Tilt-a-World/All Ideas/Rants/Poetry/Prose/Dreams are legal property
of this writer

Bless Richard Drew for the Photograph and for all of his photographs of that day
so that we do remember. Sometimes we have to look at things that are difficult.

Bless Father/Chaplain Mychal Judge and Father Grogan...the 2 Priests who died
on the actual site of the World Trade Center, the first while giving last rites and the
second who was a passenger in a plane who hit one of the World Trade Towers.

May we learn to love one another better and listen more...I send this intention out to
the world at large and to the Creator.





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