Elegy For The Fallen, September 11,2001 Poem by Rob Dyer

Once we foraged for grubs and for berries,
fought for our passage if need be with hand
and foot, or the delicate greenstone club.
Then we tamed the horse to run like the wind,
or pull rough traps through our forest paths.
We prayed the nymphs of the hollowed log
to float and follow the wind on its journey.

We fought to monopolize copper and gold,
spices and oil. Then we moved our traps faster
by engines of steam and of oil, through the air
in the end. But we moved to the last frontiers…..

AND the skeletal, abstinent priest stood
in await by the graves of the native dead.
He taught us to fear that on doomsday
pallid, resentful faces, led by a one-eyed man
with a red cross on a white bull mask,
would rise to torment us to stay
by their barrows, placating with flowers….

We weighted them down, gravestone on gravestone;
we called the agglomeration a city
of skyscraping towers and lights,
and made them our office and home.
But under the city and under the rats lay
breeding the curses of all we robbed of their rights,
Blackfoot or Maori or Kurd, Black Slave, Chechen or Arab.
It trembled and waited for earthquake, fault
or bomber to fall into bits and pieces
and return to the graveyard it was.

Yes, cry for the servants of progress
reassured in their bright-lit office,
such tombstones resist the nature of hate.
They will fall still believing to dust.

And we who wait by the telephone,
oh when will we learn to return
to man in His forested image
of motion and passage and joy?

January 31,2003

Postscript, February 1,2003

No passage returns through the last frontier,
the forces too great for our fingers to tame,
the implosion/explosion of bodies in space,
now bits and pieces, toys by the way.

Yes, cry for the flyers encapsuled in fire,
schooled in the math of their games of chance,
yet not counting full house as a losing hand,
they will fall never aware of their luck.

And we who watch, aware of their luck,
oh now will we learn to return
from the last frontier last night
to our day’s first motion, passage and joy.