Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In September 2001, while I sat at a stoplight on Carrollton Avenue in New Orleans, a morning radio deejay announced, “This just in; a plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.” His co-host joked the pilot needed to check his vision. They both laughed. It felt inappropriate, but, I guess morning deejays are paid to get our day off right, to make us laugh on the way to work. I was heading to teach a poetry writing course at Xavier University. Sometime during my class, my Blackberry went off. It was my wife. Through tears, she asked that I come home.

Like the Kennedy assassination for my parents’ generation, mine will always remember and recall, where we were on 9/11. Our country changed the moment those planes broke glass and sent us reeling into a long war. 9/11 also inaugurated the establishment of a new, more advanced surveillance state in the interest of enhancing national security. It is a historic moment that will long be memorialized, studied, and debated. For that reason, poems, too, will continue to be written about that fateful day.

Poems about public events offer reflection. They counter political and media rhetoric that aims to simplify. Writing poems gives citizens in a democracy a place at the table of ideas and grants us a way to engage that promotes justice and civic dialogue.

Today’s poem emphasizes the indelible impact of global events such as 9/11 on our collective memory, how we are reminded of our lack of innocence. But the poem also signals that we transform and move from speechlessness to eloquence, from uncertainty and confusion to hope and understanding. We make art out of the remnants of destruction.

Time || Immemorial
by Daniel Simon

                                    September 11, 2021

Those who remember that day 
always mention the blueness of the sky
that morning, as if to underscore
our collective innocence, as if two
of those three numerals already
anticipated the human will to counter
implacable gravity’s grievous toll.

Yet words unscroll in waves horizontal,
wresting time’s arrow from the 
abysses       of space, reminding us that
the gap between  |  and  |  is all we are given 
to nurture in the land of  the living, that 
tensile arc always lifting our feet from
the ground, suspending our fixity —

not an instant frozen in time but
eternity measured in grief-stricken-
ness, the living brought down to the 
land of the dead — who remind us 
to resume the ascent, to exhume meaning
from the rubble at our feet, to pry apart those
1’s just far enough to let others pass through.

“Time || Immemorial” by Daniel A. Simon from UNDER A GATHERING SKY © 2024 Daniel A. Simon published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. Used by permission of the poet.