On the 25th Anniversary of 9/11.
Sep 11, 2026
(Image of my own reflection, taken at the World Trade Center site, 9/11/2021, on the 20th anniversary of the unending, unimaginable trauma. It was the first and only time I was emotionally able to visit the sacred site, since the early hours of the destruction of the Towers, and of the lives of nearly 3,000 of our brothers and sisters.)
I am a ghost.
My memories are quaint, dead.
I want people to mourn quietly,
Cellphones banned in sacred places.
Selfies, taken with luminescent gravestone towers of light, illegal.
I want Frank Sinatra impersonators,
And souvenir hawkers,
And religious zealots
And boom boxes
And Chick-Fillet eating millennials
Not alive when the Towers toppled,
To be kept away from the WTC site
Where my soul was scattered asunder.
I am a ghost.
I want the two symbolic towers of light
To come from the Tower footprints —
Now the eternal waterfalls of memory-
Not from a parking lot blocks away.
I am a ghost.
I want the truth.
I want others to feel our pain,
And not use 9/11 as a reason to party,
Or to mistake the two spotlights
For a movie premiere,
Or a greenlight to commit more terror.