… nine-eleven-two thousand and one. Where were you? 16 miles away, sitting in an 8th grade math class, all we could see was the plume of smoke.
… attention all students, staff, and faculty …
… please report to the guidance office if …
… we don’t have any more information …
… everyone else, please carry on …
Radios crackled into frequency and panic flooded the rooms, bounced off of walls, bombarded eardrums. TVs were wheeled into classrooms, the cafeteria, anywhere and everyone gathered to watch as terror struck a nation. People ran, screaming through the haze of residue, sirens blared as rescuers disappeared into the chaos—and then the first tower fell.
Somehow, the world went mute. Or maybe just the TVs did. Either way, everyone’s history was changed forever …
Final Flight
an explosion of cries
heard around the world
with an echo of laughter audible in the background
without warning
you evaporated into eternal ashes
a cloud of dust seen from miles away
one by one
you all held hands in the sky
as you watched the world of terror beneath you unfold
you didn’t have time to say Goodbye
no I Love You’s before the walls and floors crumbled
the fire swallowed everything whole
mixing you with the bodies of those in the other tower
and the passengers on those planes
collapsing everything into a pile of
newly tangible lost dreams and battered souls
you danced with raging flames
if only for a second
before you became the very air that we now breathe
lining the lungs of those
no longer scared to inhale and take a breath
the weight of the dead is heavy
yet easily carried in the wind
to be taken in by the melting pot of Americans
and to cross oceans reminding nations
of the casualties of war
... been left to write 