THE BUSKER BOY

The boy stands in Battery Park,

busking beside a lamp-post in the

Garden of Remembrance, singing

a Kaddish for a lost father,

‘the final moment,

the flower burning in the Day’

Ginsberg said,

a song of last cell calls  – 

‘I love you’ – accompanying

the swift glide of those

who jumped, with the muted,

elegiac choir of thousands who did not.

He was born in July 2001,

his father a fire fighter

who climbed the stairs,

shouted, directed the

workers in the second tower

through smoke and confusion,

to safety but did not make

his own escape in the crashing

when the stair well caved.

This is his song,

sung in the voice of his son,

above the rat-tat of machines

rebuilding Ground Zero.

Now the dust has settled – 

and fine dust takes its freedom seriously,

plays Brownian games with gravity – 

dust that had to do with graves,

mass graves constructed instantly

on nine-eleven without reference

to hell or heaven,

dust that invaded the lungs

of those who fought to rescue,

of those who doused fires,

of those who searched for relatives and meaning,

this dust has had its decade fling.

The boy sings the antiphonal, next-generational song

about a hero he did not know

whose genes he shares, genes

that enabled forensics to say this thumb

found in the dust was his dad’s.

His voice carries over Jerusalem, over Dresden,

Berlin, London, Hiroshima and Baghdad ,

blown to dust by men, men who in the case of New York

meticulously bathed and shaved their bodies,

shone their shoes

the morning they smashed

their planes into the towers,

to be clean and worthy

to enter Paradise.