Sonnet: 9/11 Twenty Years Later
by John Kendall Hawkins
.
They say you can still smell the acrid smoke
of buildings and people who've disappeared;
it lingers in the air like a compound ghost
that brings synesthesia -- you taste fire,
everyday hollers have borrowed purpose,
folks fall -- you see that French tightrope walker
between failing towers, and grow nervous --
avoid passing eyes twenty year later.But you still don't understand what happened.
That trauma to history, memory,
like a shared punchdrunk dissociation
or lost, abstract intemporality.
We seem to be at the cusp of something
new, brave lights, or an event horizon.
