Looking South at Lower Manhattan, Where the Towers Had Been by Sharon Olds

Looking South at Lower Manhattan, Where the Towers Had Been

 

If we see harm approaching someone—

if you see me starting to talk about

something I know nothing about,

like the death of someone who’s a stranger to me,

step between me and language. This morning,

I am seeing it more clearly, that song

can be harmful, in its ignorance

which does not know itself as ignorance.

I have crossed the line, as the line was crossed

with me. I need to apologize

to the letters of the alphabet,

to the elements of the periodic

table, to O, and C, and H,

oxygen, carbon, hydrogen,

which make up most of a human body—

body which breaks down, in fire,

to the elements it was composed of, and all that is

left is ashes, sacred ashes

of strangers, carbon and nitrogen,

and the rest departs as carbon dioxide and is

breathed in, by those nearby,

the living who knew us and the living who did not

know us. I apologize

to nitrogen, to calcium with the

pretty box-shape of its crystal structure,

I apologize to phosphorus,

and potassium, that raw bright metal

we contain, and to sodium and sulfur, and to

the trace amounts which are in us somewhere like the

stars in the night—copper, zinc,

cobalt, iron, arsenic, lead,

I am singing, I am singing against myself, as if

rushing toward someone my song might be approaching,

to shield them from it.