Aftermath

In September, two towers fell and a plane
crashed in a Pennsylvania field, another
into the Pentagon, America’s war machine;
and three thousand screaming voices
went silent, carried into another world,
into yet another time, recorded for history,
for posterity, to be studied by eager school children
as a turning point in America’s history, a new age
shaped by tragedy and disaster, as mine was,
shaped then by a cold war, huddled below our desks 
and the death of a President, Vietnam’s raging fires.
They’ll be quizzed and tested on dates and names
and numbers, as we were, the details, the before and the after, 
but not the whys, not the whats and the wherefores since,
how we’ve changed, how we’ve become, different now.

In the aftermath of this disaster, other voices rose up, 
hateful voices against those we blamed, ”those people” 
whose skin color and origin and religion refueled a hatred 
born now of fear, a new vulnerability in our daily lives
morphing into us against them, “them” who are different, 
don’t think or feel or believe as we do, enemies facing 
each other across a Maginot line of race and creed and identity,
a battlefield on which there are no victors.

And the quiet voices, listening, are drowned out
by the vocal few who loudly call for walls and deportation,
for isolationism, nationalism, supremacy, call out for war,
those outdated ideologies that failed before in the history 
we learned, the history we forgot, shaped now by fear and hatred.