In Service: In Tough Times

"Scene of the Fire" mixed media by Marilyn Baseboar

Editor's Note: Writers were asked to respond to the theme of "service' as part of Studio B Art Gallery's "In Service" project sponsored by a grant from the Berks County Community Foundation.

by Dan Erdman

The Dust of His Brothers (for my brother, the firefighter, and the brothers he lost on 9/11 from FDNY House #55)

Tall burning buildings,
               (fearlessness runs into tall burning buildings)
mountains of glass and crushed concrete,
               (courage crawls through mountains of glass)
a shovel scrapes and turns wet shadows on the rubble…
                (strength is the sound of a shovel on rubble)

It was weeks after the towers fell,
before I circled the city block,
looked inward
for familiar tall landmarks.
But instead, lost, I saw

                                           a crater on the moon,
                               eroded badlands,
                                             mountains turned to dust,
                               a landscape
              where small particles settle
                            into low-lying quiet places,

              where only those first responders standing on ground zero
             could hear the dust that whispered
                         over the scraping shovels
            where my brother stood and worked.

Dust, on random spirals
                            rose up,
as from a resuscitating breath,
              onto the responders
                                              as they dug,
                       and as they hoped,
              and as they breathed the dust.

In the first few days they searched
and a few were rescued alive.
              And then they searched on for others to save, found none,
                             then for bodies to recover,
                            then for any remnant of human remains,
                                            and then the chilled unspoken wondering
as they wiped dust and sweat from their faces-

                Where are all the desks, the chairs, the doors,
               electronics, plastic, all the tiles from the floor?
              Where are all the pictures that once hung on the walls?...
              They are all reduced to dust. Reduced to dust. All.

And the dust continued to rise
in random spirals
as if from a breeze-
              but there was no breeze.
Dust on their sweated foreheads,
in their eyes and in their ears
and the dust whispered
that which could not be heard beyond the crater-

                 “Look at me, my brother! Look at me!
               I defy the law of gravity!
               You are taking me home to your family,
               and remembering mine.”

as my brother strained with his shovel
and breathed the dust of his brothers.

We cannot tell the dust from a ground bone
from the dust of ground concrete,
and all the chemical analyses and electron microscopes in the world
could not find a soul in a sample of dust
collected from the rising spirals, as if stirred from a breeze,
             but there was no breeze…

                                         Love runs into tall burning buildings.
                                        Love crawls blind through mountains of glass.
                                        Love is the sound of shovel on rubble,
                                        as it shapeshifts to dust and lives on alas.

Lifted

By the edge of a damp and darkened forest,
beneath snarled and shadowing limbs,
the children were held in hugs
of poison ivy (1)

but then they followed a call from an open meadow
where they were lifted by jewelweed(2)-balmed hands
onto swings knotted safely to an oak tree branch
and nudged upward toward the sky.

_____________________________________________________________________

• Toxicodendron radican, an unfortunate plant, which is what it is,
  whose genetics cause it to produce an irritant
  that results in rashes, discomfort, and pain.

• Impatiens capensis, a gentle plant, which is what it is,
  whose fruit opens at the slightest touch, and which yields
  a soothing balm while assessing no blame.

Ya Pas De Zamba
Down the axis of a long syncline
toward dull dark swampland
an orogeny vomits
two tall mountains from a molehill,
after which two people stand
on peaks miles apart.

One yells from his precipice
“All relations end poorly. All of them.”
Too much wind to hear from the other peak,
so Mary slides down the back slope
into the jungle,
joins the Peace Corps,
eats charred animals from the forest
gathered and cooked by the villagers-
“ya pas de zamba”.
All the charred animals
are called ya pas de zamba.
All of them.

She pulls a rusty nail
from the foot of a village child,
applies antiseptic and a bandage
as she and all the other volunteers
are being swept up and sent home.
All of them.

Rolls the rusty nail in her hand
on the flight out,
thinks of the child’s bandaged foot,
hopes he can hobble to hide in the forest
as she reads
that his village
is being strip-mined
by a foreign army
for iron ore.

* Dan is a consulting geologist who is presently winding down a private practice he founded 22 years ago. As his technical report writing workload is gradually reduced, he's finding more time to do things that stimulate and please the other side of his brain-- such as poetry writing and facilitating improvisational music gatherings. He is in the process of assembling his written words into two or three collections for publication because he is not capable of doing just one thing at a time.

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