one year later

Today marks one year since the terrorist bombings in London.

What I wrote to my friend Richard in England last year on July 7:

Such awful news to wake up to. It’s certainly not the first time London has been bombed by terrorists, but this time in particular broke my heart, because it happened in so many different areas at once, in places that are so common: Tube stations and double decker buses. How sad that it always takes something like this to make me and others appreciate how fucking delicate we are, how delicate the balance between comfort and catastrophe.

You know I’m not religious in the least, but I recognize that everything in the world is a miracle in its own way. The fact that the universe and human beings manage to exist at all—and not only exist but thrive—is miraculous in the purest sense of the world. Earth floats in a sea of cosmic debris and chaos, and yet it stays alive. One extra degree of tilt on our axis and everything could end. We are perched on that ledge of annihilation and yet we don’t drop over the edge. We continue our languid twirl. All those chattering cells, spinning in their proper orbits in the groundwater of blood, doing what they need to do to keep the human body working. All those neurons firing at proper intervals. The growth of trees, the bloom of flowers, the way the sun and rain may bring ruin through drought and flood and yet, in the end, they manage to trade places and restore balance. There is wonder everywhere, for those who bother to look.

But the thing is...we don’t look. Or else we only look occasionally, and then turn away, bored. And amidst all the wonder, such waste...such dreadful, sickening waste. The things people are capable of doing to each other! Mother Nature isn’t perfect; the Boxing Day tsunami proved that better than anything. So you’d think that in the face of that, humans could maybe work together and be good to each other so at least they’d have something beneficent and sustaining to carry them through Mother Nature’s psychotic episodes. And there is goodness among mankind: I see it, I know of it. But there’s so much horror there, too. The gamut runs from genocide to pickpockets. So much barbarism from such flawed little creatures.

I don’t know why, but the other day Missy and I were talking about the massacres in Algeria in the mid-’90s. Entire villages slaughtered, decapitated, mutilated, hacked to death with machetes, knives, and saws. People burned alive. Pregnant women disemboweled. Children raped and killed. If only we could say that this had been an isolated chapter in history! Ah, I don’t know...terrorist attacks always make me introspective. I just don’t understand how mankind can be so sick when there is so much simple joy to be had in the treasures of daily life.

Today’s bombings in general remind me of a poem I wrote on the one-year anniversary of 9/11:

September 10, 2001

and tomorrow there will be smoke
and tomorrow there will be wailing
and tomorrow there will be bodies
still holy from their last commute, last cup of coffee,
but this morning a tree just east of the river

cocks its branches and waits, knowing,
and it doesn’t speak,
recognizing the ridiculous inadequacy of words,
well-meaning though they may be,
and it feels in its roots the filament of despair
that flies the planes and pitches the bodies
and on the 11th day god said let there be a conflagration
and light filters green through the branches
one last time before air becomes ash
one last time in praise of this plague
this blueness
this song

song heard most recently before posting: Adagio, Moderato (Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E Minor, op 85)—Sir Edward Elgar