September 11th...

I've been reading about September 11th and seen some new and thoughtful photos I hadn't seen before, so I'm putting here, in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the event that happened a few blocks away from where I live... We were not here on the day, we arrived about 5 months afterwards, but the day is very alive here (as indeed, it was in Sydney, which is where I was at the time)



I found the photo by Thomas Hoepker in an article in the Guardian about it

Then I saw this image taken by Matt Weber


which lead me to the poem by Auden...



Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.



Love how poetry can put everything in perspective, and show the terror and the beauty, the mundane and the exceptional, and what you see all depends where look...