Eye Witness Account ∼ “Remembering 9/11” by Linda Lerner
Linda Lerner
“Safe House ∼ Chelsea Hotel Room 514”
(Text of: “Safe House: Chelsea Hotel, Room 514”)
I. 9/12/2001
What led me to this prewar haven
to sink into green moss
breathe in green like oxygen
be sheltered by these impenetrable green walls,
who or what should I thank
for being one of the lucky ones
after… one of the lucky ones
II. 9/13/2001
To get back
is to go thru numerous check points,
show ID to prove I live on Greenwich street,
am the same woman in that photo
taken before 9/11/2001, the lie…
no straight route,
diverted this way, that
people group solitary,
white masks over parched mouths
we drift down broken cobbled streets
wheeling backpacks
to or away from
what there isn’t any word for yet in English.
knocked into some other dimension
can only ask
does this subway go…
how much further to
clutching bottles of water
for our lives;
seven or eight more blocks,
air worsens; lineup of huge trucks
carrying supplies for exhausted men
in cleanup/rescue operation,
equipment to remove what
can’t ever be removed;
long row of huge white satellite dishes
flower in frozen bloom on Greenwich street;
radios explode Arabs terrorists Bin Laden;
red cross ladies eye witness news firemen police
in one place everyplace;
I adjust my mask: mouth, eyes
to see just enough
no more…
Suspicious suitcase half a block away,
and danger of gas explosions prevent us from entering our building;
we sit on wooden boxes left outside a closed store
half a block away
and wait for the bomb squad;
see my mother seated on a similar, smaller box
in our living room after my grandmother died,
hear my father’s seventeen-year old hurt voice
in his aging manhood
reach past a daughter’s closed ears,
boy thrown out by his own father
to join other boys
marching away from Russia’s
killer army death squad…
Through shift of wind’s swirl of dust particles, debris
bits, pieces … his mother pushed into a stove,
father hid in cemeteries,
caught pneumonia, gone gone …
Endless trudge thru police search snow,
three years wait in Amsterdam…
America! oh America!
Angry woman’s voice criticizing someone
for tying up the free phone
with grocery shopping rug cleaning
in times like these
snaps me back to 2001
III. 9/14/2001
I force back the urge to vomit
from the odor of spoiled meat
and stench of burning of death;
take what I need from my apartment
and flee;
new immigrant’s fear seizes me
when a marshal in gray uniform, high hat and boots
riffle skinned close
finches programmed ready
when I look like I’m
trying to sneak by without showing my papers
have not been checked by the cop
who went for a map to assist me,
and gets back just in time;
for now I breathe easy….
that night, all next day I take cover
as my father did more than
half a century ago,
smoke from another world
a war we won
blows in through closed windows, decades
from my father’s Russia,
sirens that struck fear in him
years after he left
blares thru my safe house …
hijacked planes y into the same twin towers
as this city, my city burns through
a TV screen…
I flatten my palms against the walls, press hard
into its old green, force of life green fuse
of Dylan Thomas, green spirit of
all the artists who stayed here
of Virgil Thompson, Huncke Thomas Wolf
bury myself in green to stay alive in green….
V. 9/15/2001
Crunch of news trucks outside my building,
Verizon, AT&T, trucks carrying huge cranes
construction material…
crowd snapping cameras at
the enormity of a lunatic’s vision
that made it out,
still smoking… alive
vaporized human imprints
burnt into twisted metal and steel;
all masks off now
V & VI. 9/16-17
To avoid getting lost
I go home: room 514, Chelsea,
for two days, rarely leave
except to buy food, a newspaper;
faces of the missing, everywhere,
on street poles store windows with me here…
V11. 9/18/2001
I walk up the wide steps of my building,
too preoccupied and too much noise
to notice construction crew at work
with drills, jackhammers
in the plaza outside;
flip the switch,
and the lights come on,
re set the VCR, clocks,
clean up the gray white hazardous dust
shrouds everything, and
ignorantly try using a can of Lysol
to disinfect death…
out back men continue work
on a gentrification project
begun weeks before…
first day of Rosh Ha Shona,
machines attack concrete
force green through putrid cement mud
to green a landlord’s property,
his dirty palm….
Jew descendent of people
from my father’s world,
blinded by green, inflicts pain,
on those just evacuated from their lives
to what has to be done survival;
a silent scream forced back all week
rose up in my throat, unleashed
all the artillery
a human heart is capable of
at these Spanish, Dominican, Pakistani immigrants
who barely understand English,
hired to do a job
to put food on their tables, feed their families
men like my father who came here with dreams
stare at me in bewilderment….
My neighbor rushes out to calm me down….
nothing you can do about it
words
I shove aside:
bastards, sons of bitches
killers, I scream at something
elusive, too primitive
to see, hiding right in front of me,
scream to prove I’m still alive:
to be heard
above the sound of death