The Day New York City Almost Slept... Poem by Frank James Ryan Jr...fjr

The City,
The buildings,
scraping,
blue skies-
that were really
azure, puffy, calm,
but it mattered not
this day...that day,
the day the sky
turned black
like coal,
choking coal,
throat burning char,
the kind miners felt
in nine-teen forty-two,
when fifteen-hundred strong
were buried and entombed
in a Benxhu, China mine,
an epical landslide
of biblical disaster;
moaning, screaming, silence-
echoes rang for hours-
through the bowels of the hollow cave,
long aft they'd recovered the dead.

And that's what New York City felt-
the day the blue sky turned to black,
the day two tall scrapers
fell like a house of cards,
or windows of the world in shock;
and three-thousand lives
were Souls before the night
became a darker morning next
from the day before...the day of Death,
on September eleventh,
of twenty 'ot one,
on a Tuesday morning,
that shook the Earth,
made a City weary,
that never slept,
tho' in hindsight,
she never blinked,
nor closed her eyes,
her heart or resilience.

That's how New Yorkers are,
That's how the City is-
when crisis and chaos
invades the New York state of mind;
strangers helping strangers,
each at risk of their own lives,
courage and fortitude,
with ne're a hesitation.
Ground Zero be the proof.
New York has never looked so good,
and better we are to be, always
in our New York state of mind!


FjR-MMXVI