A Brief Interlude Poem by Harlequin Rose

We interrupt this program to bring you a brief newsflash...

The lights have gone out in the city tonight and such darkness is something we New Yorkers have never known. From Battery Park thru and thru to Gotham Hall. From Grand Central to Times Square, Soho to Greenwich, Central Park to the Financial District, all the way back to the Bridge past St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Guggenheim. We are the ones who survived the moment of truth. They took everything from us but we took it back. And now the world remembers but they don't remember like we do. We remember the smells of oil, gasoline, electricity, and smoke as dust and debris almost choked us to death. We remember the sounds of screams, of metal crashing, of bones breaking. But mostly we remember the sound of fear. We remember the taste of copper and steal, of panic and desperation. There was chaos all around us, men climbing stairs and people dying before they reach the bottom. There was, 'Please exit in an orderly fashion' and there was 'We don't have time for this, lets go! ! ' Shouts, both incoherent and distinct are the soundtrack for that day. Endless flights of stairs, narrow and steep. People too numb to care about anything, suddenly become heroes by staying behind to help people like us. People who now have only memories. But as these memories stop we are catapulted back into the present where memories become questions no one will be able to answer. We look around the city tonight and it looks a lot more real and imposing in complete and total darkness. The city breathes now. It has a life that can be taken away at any moment. Why it took a September morning for us to realize that, we may never know. But we do know that of all the places that this day will live (infamy, history, etc.) the one place it will live forever in the hearts us, the people who were there.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled poetry...