Ground Zero where once the heart of the city stood,

now a giant rubbly mess, a tangle of twisted steel

and crumbled concrete walls, a giant jumble of massive splinters

(like a pile of smoldering dead spiders)

stacked together sticking up and out this way and that,

alongside dark scorched rag-like structures,

echoes of buildings, stiff skeletons leaning into the spaces

where proud massive towers once thrived reminding me of

the remnants of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

All so prominent and obvious from even far away,

from behind thin barricades far away.

The fire house down the block a tourist attraction now,

the handful of firefighters left leaning against their tired truck talking

about normal things, oblivious to the gawking crowds

still choking back tears. While outside along the street,

beneath the thick gloom, a slow-moving procession like before

a viewing, a wake, silent so silent, a glassy-eyed snake.

Above the empty space a dark black funnel cloud

in the sky immobile and staring, pointing downward,

like in a surrealist painting.

Death crashed in rained down unmercifully from above,

crushing, smashing, grinding to dust all

it captured in its grasp, all the life that once existed

on a simple clear innocent Tuesday morning.

All the horror, the crimes, the bloodshed and death perpetrated

in the name of God, someone’s God anyway,

the supreme scapegoat for murder and hate.

The flag though still firm on its flimsy pole

pushing out with the wind, reaching somewhere

as if at the beginning of a journey

away from some torture or hideous black strife,

some indescribable evil.

(Why do I keep trying, almost unconsciously,

to anthropomorphize and personify the whole bloodless tragedy?)

How will we (not to mention our children) ever make

any sense of the horrendous senselessness of the hideous

burning deaths of 3,000 strangers, all crushed,

ground to hot dust from 100 stories up,

from a burst of hell consuming the tops of two

of the tallest manmade structures here on earth.

Philosophy, politics, poetry, theology all fail to begin to explain.

And yet the clocks are still ticking,

the clocks, the clocks can never truly be stopped

from ticking.