Max Reif (1948 / OVER 400 POEMS SERVED! !)

The sun does not seem to get discouraged,
it has risen and set more than 2,000 times
since that day the world we knew ended,

when I turned on the radio and the announcer
seemed to be narrating some latter-day 'War of the Worlds'
or playing old tapes of the '93 World Trade Center bombing
on its anniversary, but then listening more I learned

that the unthinkable had happened,
the lovely, twin needle-spires I used to gaze on,
silvered by the sun, from a hill on Staten Island,
in whose bowels I used to catch
the train to New Jersey,

those mighty, lovely objects
were gone forever,
blasted towers of the tarot,
and inside, a towering sense
of the stability of the world I lived in
crashed and fell in mirrored response.

Since then, the Asian tsunami,
the end of New Orleans as we knew it,
genocide in Darfur

and yet somehow my world goes on,
habits reconstitute themselves,
even the sense of the ordinary
survived and inconspicuously
returned one day
and is looking at me now
from across the table,

for the mind and senses
are not adequate to all this