I finally discovered the poem that to me, perfectly gets at that dark place I felt in my chest on that fateful day. The poem is by the great Mexican poet, Fredrico Garcia Lorca, who in my opinion is right up there with the greatest poets of all time: Whitman, Hass, Olds, Marvin, Siken and Jackson (Major).



Dawn
—a translation of Fredrico Garcia Lorca

Dawn in New York bears
two columns of ash
and a tornado of black pigeons
dappling the water with their throats slit.

Dawn in New York morns
on the escalators of air
which lead out to a red ocean
where seagulls and wreaths of garlic drift.

Dawn descends with no lips to kiss it,
because today no morning or promise is possible.
Only on occasion, the exquisite singing of coins
that splash in the cups of the blind, which remind us
we were children.

The quick on the streets know not to dream:
for them, no new Eden, no love deleafing;
they seek a new hieroglyph in the sky, primed to choke
any sport devoid of genius and the sweat which knows no profit.

Light is drowned in steel, endless alarms,
and the terror of technology: rootless, dispeopled, unable to shadow.
And dazed there, staggering like ghostwalkers— the insomniacs,
as if narrowly emerging from an apocalypse.






And below is my humble response to the beautiful words of Garcia Lorca. My attempt is not to try to write a great poem like Lorca (because let’s face it, that’s impossible!!), but to write more like we write today, while still using some of that Surrealism that made Lorca’s poem so memorable:

Dawn 2
—after Garcia Lorca

Lorca, you couldn’t imagine
what those planes looked like
(if they even had planes back in your day)
flying into those two silver towers
like metal birds flying into metal trees.
Words cannot describe these things.