Written by
Robert Hunter after spending some 2 weeks in
New York City in the wake of the terrorist attack which destroyed the
World Trade Center.
Hunter is maintaining an occasional
blog dealing with the reprecussions of September 11 at:
http://www.dead.net/RobertHunterArchive/files/newjournal/50journal_9.10.01.html#anchor6395535Check it out/
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Ancestral Voices dominate
this sordid Sabbath
with arguments of war,
dialogues of destruction.
Conflicting claims on reason
raise the question
which is grain and which is leven,
which the bread and which the oven?
Mountain of Lower Manhattan
swarming with abandoned faces,
smoking, stinking Rock of Ages,
consolidated flesh, cement and circuitry
seeded by sorrow, Rise!
Like vapor from a cauldron, Rise!
Remains of ruin,
take form and countenance,
a name to summon by,
eyes a fury of compassion.
Draw your dusty robe about you,
stride the Hudson to the sea,
upon, above, below, go silent
past rimed ruins of Atlantis
and Titanic's fabled shell
toward the battlefield of nations.
Lift the innocent from
the field of restitution,
pluck missiles from the sky
like flaming blossoms.
Let your head be crowned
with roses, ribboned,
Liberty embodied to
the eyes of innocence -
to others coarse, unkempt,
snarled with blooded thorns,
Mother of Vampires.
Let the blameless see a unicorn,
where others see a lion.
Who dare's ring History's fatal bell
and pave the road to Heaven
with the cobblestones of Hell?