Conference of Ghosts: A Secular Lament for
September 11, 2001
Prayer
I am not worthy to speak in anyone’s name.
My sinfulness and impurity are known
To those I love and those who love me.
May I be forgiven for my anger
And despair, the sin of sins.
May the voices of those who died
On this day and those who die in their name
Forgive my audacious humility.
The Feather
One night without moon
in
The Holy One appeared
to humans
And let a feather
float through the air.
Word of its power and
beauty
Spread throughout the
world. Everyone
Imagined its semblance
and purity
In their fantasies and
believed
Them to be the truth.
If this feather
Had not drifted to the
ground,
Our planet would not
know
The Holy One. It is
his beacon,
And lives on in each heart.
Listen if you can,
hear these words,
And if you desire the
Way,
Set out, no matter
what others say.
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The Day We Walked on
Giants
The children do not know they walk
on the shoulders of two giants at the top
of the world, in the city where the veins
of money flow and iron ships steer the
through waves seething with sunlight.
We point telescopes up
Broadway, Seventh and Eighth,
and at the
where lovers meet on an appointed day
in movie heaven and make their vows and promise.
The telescopes do not expose
much about the land of what may be,
as does pressing my face against glass
that touches the air like skin and biting
the head of vertigo many floors below.
The children rollick down the ramps
on the rooftop where antennas
beam fantasies that chronicle
our lives and its deceits and the despair
of wanting to inhabit other lives.
We eat a
hotdogs and sauerkraut, ice cream
and soft pretzels and then walk
to the subway below. The turnstiles
tick our number, gauging the time
of hope and joy we spent in the home of the birds.
Rebel of Hope
to Phillippe Petit
When I danced on the wire between
their steel bodies, my towers whispered,
their breaths buoyant on my wings
as I danced in the air above the mean
streets, rebel in the cause of hope,
my alcazar among birds, my towers,
my children whose turbulent hearts
I tamed with tenderness and beauty.
--------------
The lovers
A woman fell into a
river.
Her lover dived in
without a thought
And swam against the
undertow to
Reach her and pull her
to shore.
On the banks she cried
a while,
Thinking of his
bravery and how
he might have drowned
as well.
He said, “I swam to
save you,
My love, because we
are one,
as lovers are and have
always been. The river
tore you
From me, but now we
are together.
You are I, and I am
you,
Why then talk as
though we were two?
To talk of two lovers
makes no sense.
We are one, as what
cannot be named is One.
--------------------------
The towers were clothed in fog
that night we walked the streets
shooting pictures of
in the dark. We ate on the restaurant patio,
the two giants asleep on the banks of the
She had flown from
the week with me and joy in flowers
in the corner stores, the fish mongers
in
where everything is possible.
We wrote erotic poems on the paper
table cloth, quoting Genet and imagining
the scene in his Balcony
where mock
leaders from the bordello stand
in the charade of their sexual fetish
and quell a rebellion, no one the wiser,
Genet’s bitter irony lost in the anarchy
of our laughter.
Two women lovers flirted at the next table,
eyeing us as we laughed and kissed.
One was from
Her lover taught in a university.
We took each other’s photos
And told our stories.
In the fog on a street
Where strangers shy away
From each other and hug
The darkness, we clung
To our lovers and passed the time
Assigned to us, finding safety
In the moment, trust in the shimmer
Of mortality, the body of our touch.
Falling Feathers
Defying belief and disbelief,
they fall to earth like feathers
from the body of God, holding hands,
fingers stitching skin that last
night trembled with promises.
Gravity does not own them,
two atoms dancing in death’s
caress, they float in the flame,
an alembic whose wisdom
heals hands held to shield
the face against the backdraft.
-----------------------
The Lover Lost
I lie next to our child
Who has cried herself to sleep.
I can only imagine her dreams
Are haunted by your face as it
Left us so quickly and without farewell.
I remember your fingers and warmth
as they played along my sweetness.
Now I feel an empty hole in my stomach
that hole is you in me
And the love I have for you
This bed we shared with so much
joy, anger, forgiveness, play among angels.
This child who is half of you
The life that I must hold onto now
Like a swimmer in an ocean
So deep and lonely and no one can
Hear this prayer as you fly
To whatever home exists beyond time.
-----------------------
Geese on the Pond
As geese fly south overhead,
I find two afloat in the marsh pond.
They fold their heads into their bodies
and sleep amid the roar of trucks on the street.
On the coast 1800 miles away, the fires
still burn, the steel towers rubble,
hearts and lungs stifled in the dark.
-----------------------------------
The Day
The crows were noisy in the trees all month,
and one perched in the sun
on a dead ash that jutted from the marsh
jawing irascibly when I walked outside.
I consulted a book by a native healer
to decipher the sounds. If only I had
listened, if I'd heard what they said,
I could have warned the others.
Only after the planes fell
from the sky and the giants lay
in the dust did the message make sense.
---------
Postapocalyptic
Remarks
Coming up the
exodus, men and women
wandering north, walking up
the center of the
road, following the white
lines, one foot in
front of the other, mechanized.
Behind them is thick
black smoke, before
them are blue skies, a
nearly perfect fall day. They come
north gray with dust,
with a coating of pulverized concrete.
They come in suits,
clutching briefcases, walking singly or
in small groups.
People stand on the sidelines, offering
them water,
cellphones, applauding them like marathon runners.
They are few and far
between.
-- A. M. Homes
-------------------
The glass giants are ash, smoke and abstract
façade of twisted pillars in the glare of flood
lights. Firefighters and police sift the trash
for life signs, any clue to wipe the stain of carnage
from concrete and swirling dust.
From the leather offices strewn with arcane figures flowed
bread and wine to our tables, and treasure from beyond the
sea.
The empire in its infancy became an evil so great that the
hearts
and lungs inside were not worth a word of scripture or the
reward
of heaven in a mind flying at the speed of sound.
Financiers, artists, executives, cooks, waitresses,
secretaries, firemen, police, computer analysts,
Muslim, Jew, Christian, Rasta, Sikh, and Hindu,
those gentle bodies, those lives
so precious no evil can mar, those ghosts incredibly alive
now beyond life and death, outside terror and the cinders of
fear.
--------------------------------------------
Ground Zero
At ground zero there are moments
When the hole of hell yawns
And emits a that only
The insane can imagine. We sift
Stone by stone, bucket by bucket,
The desecration of our heart,
Finding the bloody spoor of prey
Whose bestiality no animal
But man can devise. Our heroes
Lie at our feet, their ghosts
Calling from the hole, on phones
From nowhere, their cries
For help haunting the smoke
That hangs in the air
and poisons our lungs with hate.
---------------
Nomad
“We -- with God's help
-- call on every Muslim who believes in GGod and wishes to be rewarded to comply
with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and
whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and
soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters
allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may
learn a lesson.” – Osama bin Laden
I beat them in the alleys with my fists
When the casinos closed and the eyes
Of the women scintillated with desire
At my prowess. A confidant of the King,
I wandered in the oases of milk and honey,
wealth and power knelt. Then the Word
Of Allah enlightened my heart,
And I submitted to Allah.
When the communist infidel enslaved
Our brothers, I came to fight for the freedom
Of the oppressed and to drive the invaders
From all lands where our brothers.
Allah, the all-merciful and compassionate,
Blessed me and
They are weak and run from ruin
Like jackals scared of their own laugh.
Later, in war, I saw the fear of death
In their eyes when the fires blazed
From the tanks and helicopters
Allah’s fire struck from the heavens.
They are soft and do not have the sand
In their veins that can harden in rain
Or run softly through crevices
to split open the largest rock.
I am as patient as the sands
and as silent as the wind
That brings the words
Of the fate God gives.
They are ignorant of God’s ways.
They desecrate the soil of the holy
Sites. The fire of their blood
will wreak god’s vengeance
And prepare the road
For his final glory.
They came to our land like
The spies spoken in the Quran.
They told us lies thinking that we did not
Know their ultimate purpose.
We fought to learn their ways
And to find their strength
For the day we would drive
Them from our sight
And scatter them like sand
before the wind of holy war.
I bend the machine to the will of God.
In my hands, I turn their death machines
Against them. I am not a cog of their
Wheels within wheels, for I have come
Out of their abyss of sin and found
The strength that only Allah gives.
I will die, as all flesh does. I will not
See the final victory of our just cause,
I am prepared for Allah rewards the merciful.
All who fight the oppression of the widow
And the orphan are glorious in His eyes.
-------------------------
The Telegram
Do not speak to me about friendship,
those bonds we forged in war
and walked away from in our march toward empire.
Do not raise the flag of your dead
and send me pictures of your maimed
and orphaned. I sent you millions
and a letter of thanks, is that not enough?
Is the thanks you send back a plane
filled with victims to your idolatry?
-----------------------------
Telegram 2: Chickens
Coming Home to Roost
You came to our land and treated us
Like pawns in in your game of chess.
We sheltered you, warmed you in our homes,
Ate from the same dish, and led you
Through the paths in the mountains.
We follow to fight for freedom.
We took your money, it is true,
Our account balanced by the dead
Who died in the name with the holy
Name on their lips. We buried the dead
Without grief
Your leaders called us freedom-fighters,
The image of your fathers. But when the fires
Dimmed and the enemy crossed
The bridge in defeat, you left us,
Abandoned, crippled, our lives
In ruin, our women raped,
Our food gone, the gangs
Marauding the ruins and slicing
Into our arms and eyes
And defiling the holy word of Allah.
Where were you then? Why did you leave?
Friends do not abandon friends.
-------------
The Preacher
God is just and has knocked at the door.
The men who love men and women who love women
Stoke his anger. His justice is harsh
But righteous in its payment for the lives
Of the unborn we throw into the maw
Of licentiousness. We breed this hate
Of God in our loins, but He will burn
It from our hearts in tears and gnashing
Of teeth. Listen to the word of God
As it cries from the ruins, the shattered
Glass, and the towers that fell
In
The cloth of your nakedness and repent.
For war is coming, and only the clean
Can survive. We will return humbler
From the wars of retribution against,
We will rise from the blood, cleansed
Of our sins and our cloaks bright
With the light of suffering.
-----------
Voices on the Corner
They saw the end before the day dawned,
In their dreams and ranting from their heap
Of trash in the subway, the Bowery, or
They who know that wealth does not come without
Taking it from another mouth, who feel suffering
As a gift, and who inscribe obscene symbols
On the walls where the temple stands.
They saw it as clearly as you or I see
Each other, but the face they imagine
Is infinitely tearful, drawn in space
where the parallel lines of lives
Criss-cross insanely, and merge with a melody
Of lamentation and prayer to a God
Whose sun shines on the evil and the good.
They walk in the furnace and speak with angels,
and interpret the
dreams of the president,
who’s too busy to hear. They know justice
Has no account books, the mind numb
with pain blinds the eyes and clogs
the tongue at the roof of the mouth
with injustice. “Balance the raw nerve rich
with hate in love,” they say,”
wrap yourself in the cloak of grief,
as pure and light as a bird on the wire.”
-----------
The Moths and the
Flame
They gathered together
fluttering in the night
To decipher the truth
about the candle light.
Many went and came
back with news,
One about the window
through which it viewed
The glow of hope,
another singed its wing
Against the lips of
the flame, but still they
Could not tell the nature
and the abundance
Of the fire that
consumes with eternal delight.
“You do not,” said the
mentor, “bear the signs
that show on those who
fathom how it shines.”
Then another went and
passed far beyond
Where the others had
feared, wooing the light
Like a lover in the
dark, dipping and soaring
In a trance before the
glorious face at the heart
Of the fire, before
its gaze. It was engulfed,
Wings, head, eyes, and
body consumed.
When the mentor saw
the sudden flare,
He said, “He knows, he
has felt the truth
Beyond all knowledge,
all words, all speech.”
To wander beyond
reason, to stare death
In its depth, to give
your body and soul
To consuming passion
for what eludes
The mind. No Self
clinging to flesh
Or desire for the
world is admitted there,
Where identity
disappears in rapture and love.
A Song to be sung with
Fear and Trembling
Seagull overhead,
Scavenger King,
From what fable do you ride,
To what land will you glide,
What word bring
From mouths dry
From famine, eyes
Dark with ruin,
The flame from the sky,
The snarl of the air,
The whine of dogs
Licking at the trough?
The Cynic
Finally, we can die for something.
Finally, by the grace of God, we can leave
Travel to other to expend our self-disgust.
The enemy is merciless and craven
and without shame, and so we will carve
our tons of flesh and draw our buckets
of blood to wash the
gory face of Mammon.
-----------
Kali
You fell into the pit of my stomach
And I gave birth to you from my womb of tar.
Snakes squirmed around my spine and bit
the chakra of hate. I’ll bomb you into the Stone Age,
rip your hair by its roots and hold it
above the mouths of my devotees and feed
their frenzy. Die in me and see the impermanence that is
life.
----------------
Ghost Dancer
Oh, you grass widows,
Oh, you grass widows!
When you look at your
work, you will think of me!
-- from a legend of
how Coyote learned the Ghost Dance
Invisible, dancing where bullets are ice
That melt in the air, cloaked in small pox,
Anthrax, the radiation of ions, ancestors
Appear before my eyes, come back,
Come back, come back to feed the orphans,
the widows, the men who long for their wives
In their beds at night. We will not die,
We will not die, we will not die,
the life beyond death protect me.
Maize and meat and the fields of plenty,
bring them in your hands of light, let clear
streams flow from your mouths,
Sing the song of the hawk on the wind,
Scatter the enemy with your piercing cry,
Bring this peace that fills our bellies,
Brings birth from the pyre, cleans
The graves filled with so many.
I will not die where death has no power,
The joints of my limbs will not break,
Blood will not flow from my heart,
For you are here, you are here, you are
Here, children beyond death, beyond death.
----------------
Oblation
"Your prayers are your light;
Your devotion is your strength;
Sleep is the enemy of both.
Your life is the only opportunity that life can give you.
If you ignore it, if you waste it,
You will only turn to dust."
---- Rabi'a
The terror that brings me to these words,
The horror and sickness I feel that words
Are not enough, the sin I make in speaking,
How can I rail against the pain without
Pain itself balling in the gut and forcing itself
through my throat? I’d fly in the wind
And merge with its velocity, drive my car
At the edge of the cliff and go over its rim,
If I thought I’d come closer to the pain
That they felt. The suffering of the child
In the suburban home, the tear in the eye
Of women and infants gathering food from ruins,
Can I sharpen the edge of my knife
On the rocks that smoke on the horizon,
Rasp its teeth on the steel girders
And console the sting of death?
Let me bring these sparks of confusion to the altar,
Set them on the pyre and merge into the light.
Then, then, will I find what I am looking for?
Find reality beyond time, the oneness that animates
All life, pulls together these fragments and ties
The knots in my muscles? I have nothing to offer
On the altar but this flesh, this desire of desire,
The lie and the fear that the flesh bears.
-----------------------
Mists Among Birch
Trees
Mists roll across the wetlands from the thicket of birch,
a half-moon behind clouds. Emptiness inside the raw wind
from the
and Huron legends of eating human flesh. I cringe
at an evil presence, the earth under my feet soaked with
blood,
land where Indians once walked, lives torn apart
by war and an empire’s genocidal urge.
I think of the house behind me and how it came
into the hands of whites. Was it betrayal, some death
however small? In that question, I think:
Death is in our nature, need and hunger and strength
beyond all words and formula. Survive the cold,
scrape out a hovel in the dirt, shovel plump
flesh from dirt, life affirming
itself through death, death through life.
-----------------------
"Purify your
heart and clean it from all earthly matters. The time of fun and waste has gone.
The time of judgment has arrived. Hence we need to utilize those few hours to
ask God for forgiveness. You have to be convinced that those few hours that are
left in your life are very few. From there you will begin to live the happy
life, the infinite paradise. Be optimistic. The prophet was always
optimistic." –
from a Letter of the Muhammad Atta, hijacker
-----------------------
Sign of the Times
It's impossible to say what things mean.
In streets around the world,
they flash the V, spread-eagled fingers
in Washington, Tienenman,
on this day when the heavens
rained missles filled with human
cargo. What peace do they I
intend to say as they celebrate
the demise of tyranny?
----------------------
For a month I’ve watched television all day
and fallen asleep in its gray light. The towers crumble
in photons across my retinas, over and over,
the fires of the jet fuel weakening steel beams
set thirty-nine inches on center, slicing the plane
apart like a loaf of bread that bleeds gore.
The harvest moon rose orange the other night.
In another time worlds away, at harvest time
I would watch television late into the night,
except when storms rumbled in the valley
and lightning threatened to strike the TV
antenna, my grandmother said, and set the house on fire.
One night, I dreamt that the dead ancestors
Walked up the back stairs, and I heard their voices
next to the bed. I did not know how
to decipher their words spoken from
the other side of life. How do the dead say
anything, except what might point to death?
The couple upstairs bicker early in the morning,
make love in the afternoon on the sofa above my head,
and shove each other around again at night.
Sometimes one says they’ll kill the other one.
The baby cries for hours. I have pity for them,
Know how hard it is to raise children when you’re out
Of work, The strife
---------------------
“Finally, my children, to envelop each word,
each part of the rest,
Allah is all, all,
all—is immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and
many-a-more removes—yet Allah, Allah, Allah is there.
Has the estray
wander’d far? Is the reason-why strangely hidden?
Would you sound below
the restless ocean of the entire world?
Would you know the
dissatisfaction? The urge and spur of every life;
The something never
still’d—never entirely gone? The invisible need of every seed?
“It is the central
urge in every atom,
(Other unconscious,
often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its
divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in
subject and in object, without one exception.”
– Whitman, from “A Persian Lesson”
--------------------------------------------------------------------
To the Unnamed
The
I praise you, warriors who died without name
in the mountains and deserts of the
You dealt the Joker to the death-dealer, killed
in the name of elusive justice, trusting in duty
without question, the ecstasy when evil kneels
in the dust and prays for mercy. The card you deal
trumps evasion, strikes dumb logic, laying to
rest all life, raising the stakes ever after.
You know the certainty that quells all doubt.
-------------------------
"Attention Taliban! You are condemned. Did you know
that? The instant the terrorists you support took over our planes, you
sentenced yourselves to death. The Armed Forces of the
"Our forces are armed with state of the art military
equipment. What are you using, obsolete and ineffective weaponry? Our
helicopters will rain fire down upon your camps before you detect them on your
radar. Our bombs are so accurate we can drop them right through your windows.
Our infantry is trained for any climate and terrain on earth.
"You have only one choice ... Surrender now and we will
give you a second chance. We will let you live. If you surrender no harm will
come to you. When you decide to surrender, approach United States forces with
your hands in the air. Sling your weapon across your back muzzle towards the
ground. Remove your magazine and expel any rounds. Doing this is your only
chance of survival."
Standing at the edge of self-deceit, where revelation
Has died and the scientists of desire seek shelter,
I find answers to questions only a mute might ask,
Where words are a virus and nothing is real,
The word a disease that warps the brain stem
And resurrects the memories of a zombie.
All the films I’ve seen can’t recall the horror
Of the demon that drives us to find heaven
In death. What do I seek in celluloid worlds,
Except my own death or the death of another
That makes me real again? The ghosts crowd
the dirt hole to drink sacrificial blood and cry
“Let us make war, for our lives cannot find rest,
we are but shadows until blood fills our eyes.
Then we will see, then we can thirst once
More for the life that passed us by.”
If I had the sight of a bat, radar
To scry the silent flight of hunger at evening,
I’d detect the great imago of ultimate passion,
The search for that which words or ideas
Or the algorithm of synapses cannot define.
These are the words of a less than false prophet, too lost
In confusion to bear the nation to
The land of milk and honey. If I will be saved
For my transgressions, for a sickness bred
In my DNA, perhaps it is that I never
Stopped listening to the ghosts as they
Whispered from the outskirts of nowhere.
They caught in their arms the bodies falling from the
towers,
They ran without question into the belly of the beast
That spumed fire around their eyes and belched
Smoke through the walls. Floor after floor
Into the danger that knows no name,
Into a realm of cleansing and desire,
For it is desire to die for others that bears
Us up from the gravity of deceit, the corruption
Of compromise in the face of death.
They spoke no words in the circle of forgetting,
Their eyes already filled with a time beyond time,
Their bodies turned to an ash that the greatest artist
Cannot conceive or mimic, the blood that cannot question
Its source, the spring of life cool to their tongues.
---------------------------------------------
The harvest moon rose orange the other night.
In another harvest time, in a place where the earth is black
And the morning ripe with milk from the teat,
the dead ancestors walked up the back stairs,
and spoke next to my bed. I did not know what their words
spoken from the other side of life meant.
How do the dead say anything except what omens death?
-----------------
It is better to go to the house of mourning than to
the house of feasting; for this is the end of all men,
and the living will lay it to heart. . The heart of
the wise is in the house of mourning [Ecclesiastes
7:2-41.
My dearest children, In these times when death has
come once more to our doors, I find myself faced with
the horror of history and impotent with regard to
where it will strike. Does it appear to you that we
are all dolls that a brutal and merciless fate crush
and mutilate, as children sometimes do to their toys?
How many times have I looked at your toys lying in the
bathtub with heads and limbs missing and thought that
a terrible fury does indeed lie at the heart of even
the innocent and pure.