National Tragedy

The themes that presented themselves to me after reading the 9/11 poems were time, and the people who are left/how we go on.

Time and our relation to it seems to always become so important in the face of a tragedy. In the poem “September Twelfth, 2001” by X.J. Kennedy the actual time is featured in the title and the last lines evoke not only emotion, but the sense that time is fleeting; not simply being whisked away on the wind, but violently disintegrating: “Alive we open our eyelids on our pitiful share of time,/ we bubbles rising and bursting in a boiling pot.”

“These things that happen in the particle of time we have to be alive,” is a striking line from “War” a poem by C.K. Williams which tries to deal with tragedy by relating to human tragedy throughout the ages. Thinking about our history as a speck of time raises the question of how important or unimportant we are. This poem is ambitious and remarkable; it is hard to describe how the poet intertwines our “complicity, contrition, grief.”

Of all the poems I read, Szymborska's moved me the most. The attempt at suspending time for the victims plunging to their death was a noble elegy. The last lines were very beautiful and powerful,

“I can only do two things for them-

describe this flight

and not add a last line”

However I think the most similar to Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in The Dooryard Bloom'd” is the poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski. Reading this I assumed that this poet wrote this with “Lilacs” in mind He writes of the “thrush,” he writes of “praising” the mutilated world, just as Whitman wrote of praising the universe and all it contains which includes death. Of “joyously sing[ing] the dead.” Zagajewski even writes of the “gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.” Just as the “western star” keeps returning to “hold” whitman, the grief unrelenting as the passage of time, the light in this poem functions the same way.

Zagajewski's poem also attempts to encompass more than just New York. Whereas many of the 9/11 poems in this online collection are presented as a snapshot, (perhaps because of the nature of the tragedy, the shock that set in would maybe allow for a narrow focus), Zagajewski's poem spans time and seasons. He is never specific in pointing toward New York as the subject, but the poem is one of loss which all people can relate to. Just as Whitman never mentions Lincoln, he attempts to heal with a more universal stroke of the pen.