Half Changed World

It was grey and drizzling in DC today.  I told one of my colleagues that I was glad it was overcast and, without hesitation, she said "not another perfect blue sky."   Moxie says the sky was bright blue in New York, just like five years ago.

Some links:

• Photos at Vanity Fair, via Bitch PhD
• Kristie at The Dish on what it was like to work at 2 World Trade.
• Fred at Stone Court on the politics of 9/11 observations.
• RJ at Procrastinet on his September 11.
• The Onion: NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole.

I hope no one is offended by the inclusion of the Onion piece.  After September 11, for a long time I had this poem taped to my office door.

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
-- Yehuda Amichai

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Current Affairs, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.