Twenty Years

Twenty years later
and this is still the only day
in American history
like this.

(Except the burning
of the White House,
War of 1812,
8/24/14,
a response
to York.)

That is what 
we felt in those days.

In WWII
this is what Europe looked like,
a continent.

This is what it looks like
when war happens.

This is what
traumatized 
a nation.

In twenty years 
many things have happened since.

Incredibly,
it took no time at all
to forget
how that day felt.

No time at all,
and there were people
who argued it was staged.

That’s the world we live in.

No time at all
and politicians
started thinking,
“We will lose power
if this remains the narrative.”

No time at all
and the reality
of a war
became a preamble
to twenty years 
of claiming
it was America
that turned aggressor.

Twenty years
and they still work to identify 
the bodies.

Twenty years of victims.

Twenty years, a lifetime 
for a new generation 
born after and growing up
in the shadow of fallen towers.

Twenty years after a morning
in which I was in the cafeteria 
having breakfast,
listening to the radio,
and they break into a report
about a plane flying into a building.

What does this even mean?

I go to my first class,
Jennifer Moxley’s English class,
studying things
like the Canterbury Tales,
ancient history
told in a version of the language 
I learned in a different class.

Cutting across campus
the reports led to students 
congregating around TV screens.

I skipped French class.

I went to my dorm,
I wrote an email to my parents,
and my mother expected 
a phone call.

Why didn’t I give her that?

I grew up in Maine.
At that time I was enrolled 
at the University of Maine,
in Orono.

Some of them traveled
through Bangor 
to reach their flights
that day.

Just a few days into
the school year,
a few days after I turned
twenty-one.

I still have never been to New York City.

I never went
to Yankee Stadium.

I never saw Hamilton.

Never saw the Statue of Liberty.

I cannot imagine
what it was like
to be there that day.

You can see all the images,
the footage,
even films
that give you an idea,
but that day turned into
that night,
that week
(it was a Tuesday),
a year,
two,

twenty.

You can meet people,
randomly,
sometimes just trying
to get a job,
the last thing you expected to hear 
that day,
and they will tell you
their connection,
their link,
their heartache.

You can form unexpected bonds
with longtime New Yorkers
and they will have their memories.

Twenty years,
and we just concluded a war,
and an evacuation 
in a country
we could no more comprehend
than the idea of experiencing 
this day
every day.

That’s why we went there,
and twenty years later 
that country
is as inscrutable to us now
as it was then,
a world away.

Twenty years 
and that day
is equally inscrutable.

It is a day
of impressions,
a day when things went missing,
people, ideas,

and in the twenty years since,
unity was found
and then lost.

Twenty years
and many awful things later,
but nothing like what happened
that day.

And I think
that’s 
what we all felt,
not just a day
that we would always remember
but a day that would loom
so long in our memories
that we tried
desperately 
to blot it out,
as happens with trauma.

We’ve done this before.

We know about Dolley Madison,
we know that she tried desperately 
to salvage her home.

We also consign the war around her
to national embarrassment,
holding no significant place
in our history.

Of course it does.

Twenty years
and two hundred,
and human nature
keeps getting in the way,
we experience these things
and we think we have it coming.

Yeah.

No suffering is earned.

There is no excuse good enough.

Not here,
not anywhere.

And so,
what must happen 
for us to believe
that we should fight for a world
in which things like this
don’t happen?

In twenty years,
in two hundred,
it would be nice
to know there might be
an answer.


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