A Foolish Figure

Ten years ago I was about two weeks into my first year of high school, when our math class was interrupted for an assembly upstairs. Once we had all filed in, the principal told the school that my dad and one the other two dads who worked in NYC were safe, and though they had yet to hear from the last they had good reason to believe he was as well. Our principal explained that the Twin Towers had been hit by airplanes, and while he was telling us what had happened, a teacher came up and whispered to him, and he told us that they had fallen.

That was probably the most shocking and tragic moment in my experience to that point, and I do not know that it has been surpassed since. I'm very thankful that my dad survived, though he was in the train station under the WTC when the first airplane hit the building, and he worked just a few blocks away.  I'm thankful that both the dads of the kids in my school were unharmed. I'm thankful that it happened relatively early in the morning, before even more people got in to work.   But there were thousands of others--nearly all civillians--who did not survive.

Life goes on, and I know that I personally do not think about 9/11 much, except when I'm driving toward NYC--the skyline still looks wrong.  But there are still those who cannot forget because a father or daughter or spouse is still not there.  There are even more who have lost loved ones in the past ten years who sacrificed themselves to defend our country overseas.  May the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001 be a reminder to pray that God would protect our country and bless us with peace, and may it make us more thankful for all those who are risking and have lost their lives for us.

I became very excited about writing fiction around the beginning of 2001.  I wrote this work of historical fiction in January also not-for-school.  It was intended for a writing competition, so the length was limited.  Still, I somehow managed to squeeze quite a few of my favorite things into the story:  Classical cultures, Pompeii, tragedy, self-sacrifice, and carefully researched names. 

( Slave, but Free )

According to my records, this is the first thing I wrote in 2001, and I wrote it on my own initiative.  It may have dated around the  time that my dad and I had a little fight over Spiders, and their place in the world.  My reaction to the spider is very simple:  KILL KILL KILL!  My father's reaction to the spider is also very simple:  OBSERVE OBSERVE OBSERVE!  (You know, that just doesn't have the same force as kill kill kill...but I will let it stay to preserve parallelism.)  My dad will leave spiderwebs in the weirdest places because he thinks the spiders are absolutely fascinating--including in the house.  He would scold me if I killed spiders IN THE HOUSE!  Anyway, we made a deal that I would never kill spiders outside the house, and he would never give me a hard time (i.e. throw spiders at me...yes...he did threaten to do that...).  I have held to my side of the bargain ever since.

Anyway,  I don't know if that's why I wrote this poem, but I did write it. 

I don't know when I actually began to grasp the concept of meter.  I certainly knew iambic, trochaic, dactyllic, and anapestic even in seventh grade, but as this poem shows, I wasn't able to apply the concept to real life.  Oh well.