9/11, The Reflection--- 13 years later

The smoke encompasses them, delving into the very depths of their hopes and dreams


The noise is deafening; defying every compulsion to scatter, hearing the glass shatter


The ground oscillated as lives were decimated- it was too much to take


I am wounded by the choices that each individual had to make


Stay or jump, you stop and think. What about their family?


Billows of grey fog lingered in the air- "My brother, my daughter, my husband, I can't find them anywhere"


One plane, two--- they saturated the air as they came hurling through offices, but people were still there


A man reaches out, staring, conceding that these will be the last moments he can view a picture of his family


Objects being cast down everywhere--- no place to run or feel safe with care


Hundreds, thousands of people respond


Attempting to fight a combustible blaze like no other


The crashing could not dilute their screams. The souls of a nation caught up in pandemonium of the highest degree


For many years, we were a nation of the confused, the diffused, and the scattered


But on that day, nothing else mattered


The young, the old, all of different decent-- Stretched around televisions to witness this


We were once one nation in mourning, but on the shoulders of this travesty we have risen from this turmoil


We remember all of the fallen soldiers, the responders, the mothers, the fathers, and the innocent multitude of lives lost


They will always be remembered as the angels that stood for a nation through degradation and loss