Where Were You?

Where were you
when our lives stood still-
did you see the smoke,
the black cloud engulfing the city?

Where were you
when so many lives ended-
could you feel the grief
and heart break of the families?

Where were you
when the towers crumbled and fell-
did you know just what
was going on?

Where were you
when the help arrived-
could you bare to watch
as the firemen rushed in?

I remember the day,
I remember the hour.
How many of you remember too?
How many of you will stand proud on Sunday?

Eleven years soon,
eleven long years.
I pray for the victims,
I pray for the families...

I pray for the home of the brave.

Spoiler

This is a tribute to 9/11, a horrible day for the USA. Basically I took my thoughts and feelings and dumped them onto this page. And I just found another peom that's kind of like this on the site, but this is totally an original. Yup, just wanted to mention that.

Quite a good poem for just a dump. It was sad, as expected. But....I liked it because of the question that is posed to the reader. To answer those questions, I myself was living in another country at the time and was only 5, so I don't remember hearing much about 9/11. I also would like to point out that the flow of your poem does need a little work.

Nice poem. I don't actually remember 911, 'cause I was three at the time, but I really like your poem, it changed the country forever. I think the structures of the stanzas in the poem could be more unified and have more flow. Also, I think that the poem could have more imagery or something. That's just my opinion, though. My favorite line was in the third stanza where it says, "Did you know just what was going on?" I like that a lot.

Noelle,

Overall, a great piece that commemorates the event. It certainly takes one back to memory lane - but if I may, the attacks happened September 11, 2001 - that would make it 10 years, not 11.

The poem itself, while it uses some images of 9/11 - such as the towers burning and the airplanes and all of that - well that is all very commonplace. There are hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of 9/11 poems out there. 9/11 is one of those days in modern times that reflect back on Vietnam and WWII - plenty of writers and poets came out to write about these wars - but you will find that most of them didn't quite attack the politics of it head on. Rather, they took different approaches and created whole literary movements based on these events.

There's not quite a literary movement from 9/11 yet. Will there ever be? Not too sure. But when writing poems about these subjects it's important to try to touch every reader - but in our modern times, because the event has been on tv and news and we've seen all these images a thousand times before - it's also equally important to write about it in a new light. Otherwise, what's stopping someone from reading an essay on 9/11? An article? Interviews? A memoir? Or an autobiographical story of someone who WAS there?

But since you're writing poetry, you don't want to tackle the subject the same way. Creating unique images and metaphors to have vast amount of people directly experience it - this is what poetry is!

Another thing you have to look at - basically you are saying the same thing over and over again in these stanzas. Anyways, I am not going to be too harsh on it. Overall, I do appreciate this and I do find it challenging when tackling these kinds of poems.

~ As always Audy