OK, I meant to post this on Friday for the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, but I didn't make it home in time, so I'm posting it today on the 8th anniversary of Columbia. I wrote it that day, pretty much, and I'm not sure as to its merits as a poem, but it did seem apropos, so here goes...
seventeen years ago:
you can still remember the day, the minute, the second
the scene, the sound: the principal’s voice on the p.a.
unlike you’d ever heard it, hesitant, tentative
bearing unbearable news, an explosion in the florida sky
you couldn’t understand, and maybe he couldn’t either
why God would kill a teacher
your young eyes watched compulsively the implausible disintegration, the ugly twisted cloud
and even though you’ve seen so much since then
war, revolution, airplanes
tearing holes in buildings
all soon made antiseptic by a glass tube
saturday morning reminds you how it felt when your world was first upended
columbia
first looks like a typo next to the word tragedy
but the pictures seem familiar
smiling astronauts waving, optimistic
you know what they couldn’t
so you take your disbelief
and soundtrack it with the saddest song you know
thom yorke wailing
i’m not here
this isn’t happening
as you watch, over and over
the images, so different than that old ugly cloud
of a silent meteor, brightening and splintering
as it arcs across blue texas sky
so beautiful it breaks your heart
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