Michele Lesko

September 11th Deliverance

I am here. You are dead. And every year
someone sings your praise: Hero. I regret

that restless fall day, when scooped out
by your hand on my bee-stung chest, I prayed

the way you said I should — at bedtime. You said
let us pray. You began by making me kiss the tip

of the cross you wore. Kiss Christ’s toe. A sacrament
you used to repent. It didn’t help. I never saw Christ

and you were never a father, not a savior. And I was
not a child, born again as a novitiate. Ritual is a hook.

Reeling, I begged Him to deliver me; over and over
like a curse it worked. You jumped and died. Yet
other fathers kept falling, after you.

Companion Piece

We do keep falling. All of us: fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, lovers and friends, old and young. We want community. We want to belong. It is want that moves us through this world. We want what we want. And we often fall. We use that word to refer to love: we fall in love. We use it to refer to evil: he fell from grace. We will not fall for something someone is selling us that rings false.

What we want very often clashes with what those around us want.

What did the terrorists want? Were their actions the absolute image of self-sacrifice to their brethren? Could their belief, their utter faith in their religion negate any innate morality human beings have regarding killing their fellow man?

Religious faith is power. It instills in its believers the sense that there are absolutes. I suppose there are; one instance might be the absolute sense of self, which we try to ameliorate by conditioning ourselves, often through religion, to consider the other. We acknowledge that there exists a reality outside of our individual need or desires. Raised as a Catholic I was taught to pray for the non-believers, who would ultimately suffer a terrible fate. These teachings made prayer very complicated. How can we pray for others, yet accept that they are bound for a dark fate? They did not want the right way because they did not know our prayers. But what if what we wanted and prayed for had unintentional results; what about collateral damage?

On 11 September 2001 my husband and I lived in New Jersey. I was waiting in line at a Starbucks in Morristown when the first plane hit. The barista ran out from behind the counter and shouted something about bombs hitting a building. The other customers and I followed him out into the street. He stopped in front of a department store window; he was watching the televisions displayed there. The second plane was shown flying directly into the World Trade Center. We eventually saw people falling from the windows. There followed extraordinary sadness and extraordinary heroism. But, even after a tragedy of these proportions, people began thinking about how they were personally affected. What did September 11th 2001 mean to those left behind?

“Hero” defined a great many folks during those first hours and days. Eventually altruism was commemorated. It is absolutely true that innocent people were taken and that our innocence, our confidence, as a nation was broken. But the heroes were an absolute. “Hero” defined them: if one being goes without question to the aid of another, that act of selflessness is heroic.

So when the media and politicians and essentially all Americans began referring to all of the dead as heroes, I began to wonder about our use of the word “hero.” I’m not sure we had done that before September 11th. When the Lockerbie Pan-Am flight crashed, killing two hundred and seventy people, we did not call the dead “hero.” I thought about synchronicity; there must have been people who got out of a bad situation because of the chaos: deadbeat dads, criminals on their way to the lower Manhattan courthouse, some guy who knew his lifestyle was about to implode or the guy who sexually abused his daughter night after night. He could not get away from his want. His sense of his own desire grew to far outweigh his need to belong to the community of his family.

I wrote this poem thinking only about the child who prayed for her father to die. What would happen in the mind of a child, who still resides in that magical thinking phase of development? The prayer did not equal the event, though her father did die, so the child, an indoctrinated Catholic, must acknowledge the fear that her desire caused the deaths of all the others. When we are taught to pray for others, pray for ourselves and pray for deliverance, are we culpable when our answered prayers conflict with another’s?