From the ashen sky we feel the molten debris cauterize our wounds,
numbing us to the desperate leaps from windows of lava
melting high above the expedient pavement of New York.
Frenzy and chaos give way to anger and despair
as angels risk stairways of death,
the glass and steel bending its last breath to the will of Al-Qaeda thugs,
(as if America were only spires of concrete or the dollars striping Wall Street).
Liberty did not bend an inch today nor bow her proud head to terror.
Her flame was not extinguished by renegades
contorting her frame into a twisted version of Justice
(as if Liberty needed terror’s graffiti to enhance Her image,
or hand-slap Her graceful fingers).
In the skies over Pennsylvania,
America swings back at the sucker-punch of United Flight 93,
resolute in preserving the ideal,
reflected in faces like Tom Burnett’s and Todd Beamer’s,
openly;
not hiding darkly as in a glass,
or cowering in caves shrouded in the anemia of a sickly god.
As towers crumble,
as the tephra of metal and ash
plume like Vesuvius gone mad,
we revere a photo of a bleeding child
enfolded in a firefighter’s blackened arms,
and like America, both destined to live on–to remember,
and to light the way,
because the torch is not fastened to Lady Liberty,
but to us all.
