The Sound of Their Falling

On September 11th of last year I posted a piece based on the image of people jumping from another tall building. I wrote it in 2002 with the memory fresh in my mind of that footage  by those French brothers who were hoping to make a documentary about the firehouse right there in Lower Manhattan. Of course they too ended up racing to Ground Zero and the images they captured show how dazed and helpless the firefighters look as they stand in the lobby of Tower One trying to assess the situation. Then the bodies start dropping and the elderly chaplain begins looking disoriented as well as dazed and the next thing you know he’s being carried out, dead of heart failure. I found a little of this footage on YouTube and I’ll post it below.

It was the sound of their falling that I couldn't forget - until I read that Robert Pinsky poem about the people almost a hundred years ago who also jumped to avoid the flames. That was the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire of 1911 and the dead, young women mostly, had been locked in at their machines, company policy.

Strangely enough, it comforts you to read the poem. I keep my piece about it at the top of my home page here. It used to be what I thought of whenever I thought of this awful day. Now I also think of the two people David and I knew who died there and how almost a full year later they found a credit card belonging to one and a little finger belonging to another. And I also think for all we might do wrong here in America, what other country would spend more than a year moving 16 acres of ash and rubble, then sifting, sifting, sifting and doing the careful DNA work too, all so that the families of the victims  might someday have some peace?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg8FQiJ-Rcw&feature=related]