Seeing a new truth...

I have been having nightmares the last few nights, inchoate scenes of loss and death and horror. I sit with them quietly because dreams always carry a message, but the language of the night is not straightforward, not word for word exact, but twists and coils with secret levels of enlightenment.
This morning as I was thinking of my poem for the forum I clicked on one written not long before my decision to leave NY and come back to Barbados was made. Suddenly the nightmares made sense. 9/11 was the beginning of the end of NY for me; of the thousands lost I personally knew five. Had lunch with five shining young women on the Sunday before the fall celebrating finding the perfect apartment for them after a six week hunt and they all worked together in one of the towers. And they all went to work that day. And none of them escaped. I would have been shattered anyway like everyone else who heard first one crash then the second; who stared in disbelief as man destroyed what man had wrought; who breathed the dead and burning plastics as the fire burned for days, but I knew their names, can see their faces still and so it happened in me as well as outside of me. And I left NY. The poem is one that echoes the nightmares - memories stirred by my visit a week ago rising to the surface looking for resolution and recognition. So although it is a sad and plaintive struggle to hold my ground I decided to use that poem to mark today. My vulnerabilities can only strengthen me when I embrace them and face them and grief can simmer for a long time before we are ready to acknowledge the devastation of loss.