I

t was just a common, ordinary day in the Twin Towers of this land I love, an ordinary day span on a web of never ordinary threads of life, a day like others with busy crowd of people up and down from floor to floor, with coffee’s wafting smell, with ringing phones, with errand boys delivering alert the messages for the new-pulsing day, with clients covering ambitious deals, new visitors from near and distant lands eager to reach the Observation Deck:

They’ll see the rivers and bridges and the island of Manhattan in its glow, and – look – in the Atlantic Ocean, there, so very small, the Statue of Liberty, still so majestic with her lighted torch if looked from below. An ordinary day like the others on the calendar, maybe a bit more beautiful and beaming for all the sunshine lavished on its span by Goddess Summer flaunting all around her ten last limpid and luxurious days.

W

hat happen then so suddenly? What new and unpredictable event become the end of all we know? I only know what I did hear and see: a ghastly thud as of an earthquake or crashing plane. An eerie silence ticks eternity, or is it but fleeting instant? Soon collapsing glass and steel and stone replies with an encircling globe or hissing flame. Some men lie buried under twisted beams, other are burning torches soon to fall in ashes, one upon the other. All is desolation, all is searing might, descending to the lower stories, soaring fast to the Tower’s top invincibly.

What is it makes desperate people jump from eighty, ninety floors above the earth? Lugubrious, they dangle in the air, listlessly plunging – hand in hand a few – down to their death. Is choking instantly so dire a certainty of gripping end as to allow a flickering of hope to lend us wings for an uncertain leap? God, you invented death to punish us but must a man die twice if twice he hopes?

T

here stood the second Tower unaware, there rose in firm antenna in the breeze. Somebody save me from a second hell of plumes of smoke, of rooms and offices instantly flame-enwrapped, of shreds of paper eddying in mid-air like flakes of snow, and, above all, of people people people not knowing where to flee, whether to climb the countless stairs or, driven by despair, descend toward distant life, below below.

Ten minutes, ten destruction of the world until there is no world save remnants of it, dim in a whirling chaos far away.

God, O high Lord and Ruler of mankind, I will not ask what caused all this grief to be. But dare I even think of asking why when mother pray for children’s safety, wives are frantically seeking husband’s news, and infants smile, oblivious of fate?

O sudden howling of a baffled wind!

Dust of Manhattan! Smouldering debris!

O recollection of eternal wars fought on this planet since the dawn of time! No, I will shed no futile tear today. Inside this boundless graveyard let me kneel, praying for peace within the heart of a man.

Joseph Tusiani