"Photographs of 9-11"

Someone said that there were pictures
And both afraid to look
And unable to look away
I ran my fingers across the pages
Believing somehow you could feel my touch.

Your brother,
Defiant,
With no wife at home who'd hope against all hope,
Made his choice
As if to reclaim his life as his own.

But you lingered at the edge of open air,
Shirt off,
As if by sheer force of will
You might fly home to her,
To them.

If I could take this pain away from them
Protect them from it
Feel it in their place
I would freeze the time between disbelief and terror
And trade your unfolding fate for mine.

In my mother's heart there was this need to know
And in the knowing
To somehow be with you
But the knowing simply released a flood of my worst fears
And these exponential emotions bury me.

Your face in the window, now acid etched on my mind's eye,
I will carry that unshared image to my grave.
There I'll touch your face and meet your gaze
And have the peace of knowing without doubt
That standing there you felt me there with you.

"Lost Brothers"

I was once one of three
Like Borg
Or numbered lithographs
We were a set
Our faces crowded close in photos
Like validation stamps on my father’s passport
To show that he’d been here.

We played and fought and lived and grew as one
The others even worked together
And so died together
And so I seek to fill my father’s pages by myself
To make a life big enough for us all
To let the whole world know
We once were three.

"Time Folds"

Time folds
And we call the creases years and months and days
And we stroke the well-worn edges
Like children probing threadbare knees of jeans
Intently examining them for tears
To turn our inside out lives right again

Years pass
Still we attempt to touch memory through the layers
Of a fabric both gossamer and mail
And we chaff against the tattered nets we’re in
And seek some way to mend the unraveling we feel
Or cut across the grain and change the past.

 

Copyright, Janet Moyers Bowmer.
All Rights Reserved by Author.