SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 VICTIMS This site is dedicated to the victims of September 11, 2001 tragedy.

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By Peter Casey

OPHICI

The sunlight can’t get down here

Onto my eyes.

My skin is powdered with concrete dust

So cold

It could be the ashes of all the dead in the earth

from the first.

After a while the muffled grinding far above

goes still.

And this is where I will be for ever,

Staring into gnarled iron,

A tangle of rusted snakes.
 

© 2001 P.M. Casey, January 2002

By Peter Casey

UP SO FLOATING

In the time of year the straw rustles

As if waking,

In the time of gentle warm decay,

In the time summer’s grass grows into its sleep,

In the time all sounds of earth sough,

in gauzy burnished afternoon,

ripe and lazy,

loping in the rhythm of field horses,

tired heads gently bobbing,

in the fading cicada hum,

In the time the breath of the old green gods,

grateful in the peaceful soil,

caress us in an unhurried moment,

In the time before cold turns crystal in the sky,

And with fractures crack the frigid black-ice midnight.

In the time for one birth and for one death,

In time enough to glimpse the one true God,

All came undone.

and the world fell like the soured pit of its bowels up-thrusting.

What had been up is down, what down up,

And even the stuff that binds moment to moment shattered and strewn

to dark hidden remote spaces.

And all seasons perished.


© 2001 P.M. Casey