Nine Eleven

We subjects still pay for that burning,
Tall towers tossed like trees,
In rhetoric and cluster bombs, the price exacted
For pride panicked to its knees.
I knew it then, what it would cost,
The wrath of strangers, succeeding.
Yet now even their dread revenge
Double spread in the paper reading,
I hold one beat of black-edged gladness
A camelia on our bier,
Bright as a spear, a lighter flame,
Amid the turning of their year.