Most want to remember.
Most want to mark the day.
Most want to feel that saddest of Septembers.
To remember their pain.
If we remember,
If we chose not to forget,
The lives that were lost,
Will not see regret.
I cannot help it,
I want to forget,
To put it behind me,
Not to imagine the jets.
I want to imagine the world as it was;
The world before that dreadful day.
I want to ignore it, not mark it,
So the piercing memory will fade.
But, I know that can't happen.
We must mark our grief.
We must feel our collective pain,
No matter the thief.
We were robbed that day.
And some things can never be undone.
We were robbed that day.
Yet somehow, we live, and we feel we've won.
But every time we mark the time,
the hour, the pain, the grief.
Every time we remember the sacrifice,
the horror, the sadness, the thief.
We relive it again.
The wound opens anew.
Healing, that much more distant.
Pain, the prison of a few.
Dedicated to all those innocents and heroes who lost their lives on 9/11, all those who thereafter lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those who are yet with us for a time, but will lose their lives in the wars that are yet to come. Offered likewise, in honor of the walking wounded -- the countless numbers whose lives were forever changed and marked by grief and loss, and continue to be, from the genesis that was this horrific act. May their numbers cease to be increased.
