one from thousands

eight forty-five am
the morning my life began i stepped outside the gym

BOOM!

papers falling high and trickling in the sky
a parade today we'll see?

no. No. NO!

specs of metal glittering in the sun
i should run, i need to run--are all those people gone?

A bomb? A bomb?!

showers of ash upon my head sped with confusion and fear
my office, to my office, they'll know there

It stings to see. It stings to breathe.

she asks, are you okay
what happened?
a plane, it was a plane
you mean a bomb

BOOM!

my building rumbles and through the windows it's the second tower

a woman screams and a the man on the radio says it's another plane
i gasp, i tremble--are we next?

they gather us to the center of the room and our safety is assured

five minutes later--"An upgrade in your safety has been issued. Please evacuate immediately."

Fourteen flights of stairs
round and down we go--goodbyes and laters as we flee

I'm okay. I'm okay.

but at the bottom there's flying debris
and as i squint to see my breaths become shorter, my panic longer

then a hand, placed in mine

our bodies numb, we run

---

I wrote this poem about month after surviving the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. My mind had been running at a fervent pace trying to put all the pieces together. This was my attempt to gather them in one place.

I meant for the piece to continue as I worked through all the emotions of post-traumatic stress, but until today I hadn't been able to revisit this piece since I wrote it. It's been seven years, and I'm finally finding it easier to process the events of that day. I've written a full article about those thoughts and where our country has come since then.