I

Ten years ago I stood and watched the buildings crumble:
one, then the other,
buckling under the weight
like soldiers
bending at the knee because they are so tired
they cannot stand anymore.
Prisoners of war, blindfolded, pushed
to their knees to wait
one second, and another, another,
until the gunshot that’s been ringing in their ears for heartbeats
or for days comes crashing down
and they fall like buildings
with the bones and the teeth.
Like soldiers bent at the knee
and then down, their heads
slammed upon hard packed earth
and burned and collapsed.
Bent then down
like marionettes with their strings cut
marionette soldiers
because we don’t understand,
The soldiers march to war
and they bend at the knee
then crumble like dust, like dust,
and this came out of the dust.

II

The skyscrapers were muddied, for a week,
a month, and then they shone again, all gleaming glass
uptown apartment complexes
and soho red brick town houses
and a battery run dry.
And the people all went on breathing
through the dust in their throats, and they bowed
their heads like fallen buildings.
The flowers filled up the entrance to the fire house and burst
out onto the sidewalk like debris,
red and pink and yellow petals gracing the concrete.
They fluttered in the wind
like final portrait fliers
on the front of the hospital
that closed.
The children painted tiles to hang on the fences of empty lots,
tiles and murals, as if that
would make us understand
why the buildings fell like soldiers,
and the soldiers fell like buildings.
Why this was the dust we’d grow out of
and how, ten years later, a woman came out of the dust.