Three days ago,
gale winds whipped leaves, branches, and weak limbs
and left them on the ground.
Riding to work,
the wheels of my bicycle crackled over the detritus.
What was the wind telling us -
we who had seen people jump to their death from terrifying heights
and heard them strike the ground with a sickening thud?
Those who do not understand the probity of poetry
claimed the spirits of those who died on 9/11 animated the air.
But truth is a necessary condition of poetry,
and, truth be told, millions of survivors
wanted to forget 9/11.
This poem is for them.
It says the wind was the driver of a wooden cart,
creaking under its burden,
riding through plague-infested cobble-stone streets in Europe
during the Middle Ages,
crying out to the living:

"Give us your dead.
Give us your dead.
Give us your dead."


Brandywine
9/14/02 6 A.M.

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Copyright ©2002 by Han-hua Chang.