When the Two Towers Fell

When Two Towers Fell
Christopher Bogart

When two towers fell,
It plunged a needle in the brain.
Our eyes were lidless,
Our skin, colorless.
Our fears paraded before us
In a panoply of horrors
That reduced the real
To twisted steel,
To silent screams,
To floating ash,
To tears.

When two towers fell,
Bile welled up in our throats.
We were choked
By our rage,
Acted out upon the stage
Of wrecked and ruined dreams,
Their seams sundered apart
By artless angels
Fallen from the maw
Of an all-consuming fire.

When two towers fell,
Flags fluttered
Freely from cars,
From windows,
From suburban porches and
Parkway overpasses,
From highways
And lampposts that illuminate
The dark places where
Fear finds to hide
From the timid angels
Of our better nature,
Rising past highways
Of red and white
To unite
On the night’s blue field
Of silvery stars.

Two Towers

Nine years have passed since the event pictured above changed our lives and the perceptions we had about our own safety. On September 11, 2001, I was a teacher and was watching these events unfold on a television screen in the faculty room. A young teacher standing next to me turned to me and asked, “Do you remember the last time this country was attacked?” I looked at him, and rather dryly replied, “No. I wasn’t alive during the War of 1812.” While it was a sarcastic response, it was a true one. Pearl Harbor was a part of a territory, not a part of the country, when it was attacked. Besides, I wasn’t alive then either, but my parents told me what it was like.

Nine years ago, the President spoke for all of us when he vocalized that this attack was launched by extremists, and not all of the religious followers of Islam, Nine years have passed, and instead of the wound, that was sliced open that day, healing, it seems to be bleeding still, but not in the shock and the anger of nine years ago, but in hatred of born of prejudice and religious intolerance.

The poem I am posting today was written within a month of the event. It speaks of the unity we felt on that day, not the division we are experiencing today. I posted this poem in the hope that maybe we can remember the caring and self-sacrificing of that time, and finally bury the anger and the hatred of today.

Mohammad S. Chowdhury, a waiter at Windows on the World restaurant on the top floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower, was killed in the attack of September 11, 2001.

Salman Hamdani, a New York City Police cadet and emergency medical technician, was killed that day trying to help the injured.

This wasn’t an attack on Christianity, or Judaism, but on America. And Americans of all faiths were its victims. Let us try to remember that.


TWO TOWERS
Christopher Bogart

Here once stood two towers,
Twin white monoliths,
Slender threads against a bright September sky.
One stood for Commerce -
The other, for its Might.
Proud and Defiant they stood -
Born of a country, a city,
Proud of its liberty
Defiant in its status -
The most powerful democracy
This world has ever seen.
They stood tall,
Proud,
Defiant,
And unprepared.

Two planes appeared here,
That bright September day.
As if from nowhere,
They appeared.
Aimed sure -
Shot silver –
From a dark malicious bow.
They blackened that bright September sky;
And,
In the twinkling of an eye,
They shattered our lives.

For one brief moment,
Our hearts stood still,
And a city,
A country,
A world
Held its breath
In stunned silence.

The trumpet had sounded.
All looked to two towers ablaze,
Black smoke pouring from their gaping wounds,
Flames spreading their dark smoky wings,
Born of an anger that choked and bore
In its ugly talons,
The death of thousands of innocents.

They reached to the heavens
In their pain and disbelief –
They cried out to the heavens
For help,
For relief.

Two towers shattered here,
With one rumbling roar
And then another
They fell here,
Collapsing into a cloud
Of smoke, rubble and white dust.

But on that very bright September day,
Two new towers rose from that white dust,
Emerging strong and powerful from that debris -
Rising high,
Crowned with two strong sure hands
That reached up to hold back the sky -
The hands of firefighters,
Of policemen,
Of construction engineers,
And of volunteer citizens from every walk of life -
Citizens of a great city and beyond -
Gripping girders,
Combing concrete –
Searching for the living,
Consoling the grieving
As they mourned the dead.

Two towers rose that day from the debris and white dust,
Made not of steel girder and white concrete
But of our Faith and our Love.
Hands reached into the rubble to pull forth hope,
And raise the dead incorruptible.

For we were changed that bright September day –
We did not die in the flames of our defiance and our pride.
We rose from that crucible,
Phoenix-like,
With our Faith and with our Love
To face a new day,
A new life in
A new world.

The Experience of Oxford, Part 2

The Experience of Oxford, Part 2
Christopher Bogart

The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
Camelot, Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Lowe

One of the great things about the time I spent in England, and in Oxford in particular, was the weather. Now I know that sounds a bit paradoxical, as England has a reputation for rainy and damp weather, but in the ten days I was there we had only one overcast day. It rained only briefly in the evenings, and the days were sunny and dry. I was there in the beginning of August and the temperature never rose above 78 degrees F during the day, but descended to the mid-forties in the evening. It was almost comical seeing people walking around in the evening in sandals and heavy woolen sweaters. Each of the 38 colleges has greens and gardens that, in typical English Garden fashion, are overflowing with flowers. Coming from New Jersey where our summers over the last decade have been hot and humid but with little rain, I asked one of the gardeners how often he watered these gardens. He replied, “Maybe twice a summer.”

While the colleges were built in a variety of styles that reflect the eras in which they were built, they were almost always built with honey-colored Cotswold stone. As a result, the city seems to have a certain uniformity of theme. This stone catches the light of day in different ways and at different times of the day, making it appear pale yellow in the morning to almost golden in the evening. The stone is now getting rare, and even small pieces of it are kept to make repairs.
In the summer of 2005, there were at least four Shakespeare plays being performed around town at any given time. I went to see an excellent student presentation of A Comedy of Errors in the garden at Magdalen College. Weekly orchestral and choral concerts, some in Sheldonian Hall, a hall built by Sir Christopher Wren, the architect who designed and built St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, in 1668, were advertised all over town. Museums, art galleries and botanical gardens as well as guided tours of the university and of Blenheim Palace, the “Alice in Wonderland Walk” or an evening with Colin Dexter, the author of the Inspector Morse mysteries, and the inspiration for the Inspector Lewis mysteries.

And then there are the pubs or public houses. Each of these pubs reflect different atmospheres and named for anything from the historical to the religious to the fantastic, with names like The Royal Oak (named after the oak the future Charles II hid in), The Lamb and the Flag and The Eagle and Child. The Bear is the oldest pub in Oxford was built in 1242. The Eagle and Child (or as the locals call it, “The Bird and the Baby”) was the pub where the Inklings, a group of authors which included J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (the Narnia books) met to discuss their writing. And while the serve the English “favorites” (steak and kidney pie, steak and ale pie and fish and chips), they also serve a wide variety of food, and of course, pints of ale with foam like whipped cream.

However, one night, a few of us decided to go on “an adventure.” We walked down Observatory Road out of Oxford toward the setting sun. Chatting carelessly and relieved that we had made it through the first day of the conference; we walked over the Oxford Canal Bridge and across the meadows where cows were grazing as the sun set over the field. It was a beautiful night, and reminded me of Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” We found a dirt road and walked down it until we came to a wooden bridge that spanned the Thames River. On the other side was the little town of Binsey, a town that consisted of only about five houses, and The Perch. The Perch was a thatched roofed pub that was founded in 1468. It had an outdoor eating area that fronted the Thames. We went in and found exactly what we expected – wood paneled walls and the locals having a pint and talking about the day’s events. Most of our fellow travelers sat in booths, but I went to the bar, ordered a pint and spent the evening talking to Simon, the bartender. Lost in conversation and the excitement of where I was and what I was experiencing, I barely noticed how late it was. Simon called us cabs. We were afraid of walking into the cows in the pitch black fields on the way home.

When the cabs brought us back to Oxford, I sat on the steps in front of the dorms and thought about the experience I just had. It was almost a walk back into time to a place in the past that was very similar to the one I had just experienced.

The Experience of Oxford, Part 1

The Experience of Oxford, Part 1

Christopher Bogart

I don’t want these entries to sound like a travelogue or a diary of my own particular experiences in Oxford. Personal remembrances tend to lock the reader out of the experience by seeming to say “This is what I did. Don’t you wish you were there?” I want to write something more inclusive, something that would say “This is what awaits anyone who goes to Oxford.” I know that some of the details will have to be based on personal experience by necessity, as I would not be able to share what you could see and experience without having been there myself. However, I will try to be “inclusive” rather than exclusive. And I will try to be informative as well as inspirational.

To begin with, Oxford University is the third oldest university in the world, and the oldest English-speaking University. Founded thirty years after the Norman Invasion in 1066, it really began to grow in 1167 when King Henry II forbade English students from attending the University of Paris. Today it consists of 38 self- governing colleges and 6 permanent private halls. Unlike most American universities, Oxford is based on weekly essay-based tutorials supported by lectures and laboratory classes. In other words, education is placed squarely on the shoulders of each of the students. Students do not apply for one college or another, but to the university, and is placed in a college, not based on the major, but on the profile of the student. You could think of it as being almost similar to the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. It is the home of the Rhodes scholarship, one of the most prestigious awards in the academic world. While each college has its own library (the Oxford Union, a debate club on the Oxford campus, has three of them), the university library is the Bodleian Library, one of the most unique libraries in the world, and that includes one of the original Gutenberg bibles, an original Shakespeare first folio and the oldest extent copy of The Iliad by Homer. The collection is housed in five buildings, including the Radcliffe Camera. It also has a number of museums that include the world-famous Ashmolean Museum, The Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum as well as a number of art and science galleries and The Botanic Garden. The university has produced graduates that have been come presidents or prime ministers all over the world. President William Jefferson Clinton was the first American president to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

The last paragraph only skimmed the surface of the unique attributes that Oxford possesses, but it is not the whole story of what makes Oxford so special. Oxford is not only a university, but it is a town as well. The university and the town are not separately sectioned, but are merged into one entity called Oxford. And while in the beginning of its history, the two elements, the “towns” and the “gowns” fought so violently that many students fled to found a new university, Cambridge, these two elements together, working in harmony, form the beginning of the Oxford experience. Only a few miles outside Oxford sits Blenheim Palace, the historic seat of the Dukes of Marlborough. In Adolph Hitler’s plans for the conquest of Britain, Blenheim was marked as Hitler’s residence, and the colleges of Oxford would be the seat of the new Third Reich England.

So much for the background or the broad view. In the next post, I would like to go into that uniqueness that makes visiting Oxford such an amazing experience.

Sleeper, Awake!

Sleeper, Awake
Christopher Bogart

The title of this posting, “Sleeper, Awake” is from the cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. This piece of music is based on the parable from St. Matthew’s gospel of the five foolish and the five wise virgins. These virgins are tasked with awaiting the master’s return. The five foolish virgins light their lamps early and fall asleep, so when the master comes, they have to be awoken and have no oil left in their lamps to guide the master home. Like the five foolish virgins, many of us too sleep through our lives, wasting our “oil” and concentrating on what is immediate, whether by necessity or by choice, and therefore limit our world as a result. We, like the minor characters in the poem, “Richard Cory,” by Edward Arlington Robinson,“work, and wait for the light.” However, some of us, unlike those foolish virgins, wake up in time to experience something that, even though it might be a once in a lifetime experience, will alter their lives forever.

I make no apologies for the topic I have chosen to write about. Since I have spoken about this topic and written poetry about it and posted it many times before, my readers, if there are any, must be sick of it by now. But my awakening was a seminal event in my life. I too slept for many years, focusing on what was right in front of me. I am not ashamed of that focus, as it was a necessary focus that enabled me to grow as a teacher, and to help many of the students I taught. Yet, when I was invited to experience something I thought that I would never have the chance to experience, over five years ago, I anguished over the choice for months, walking in the brisk night air of autumn, and listening to this cantata by Bach as I watched the sun set in front of me night after night and pondered whether I had the guts to accept this very special invitation. In the end, I did. And, as Robert Frost said in “The Road Not Taken, “that made all the difference.”

B.J. Ward, a very dynamic and popular New Jersey poet, once asked me what it was like to have the opportunity to present my ideas on education at Oxford University, and my simple response was “It was like academic Disneyland.” He laughed and told me I should use that phrase someday in my writing. I am following B.J.’s advice and using it tonight, for, as simplistic as it might sound, that was exactly what it was like. And so much more. Now, I know you are thinking to yourself. Big deal! It was a unique experience but there are other educators that have had such experiences. And, while I know that to be true, that fact doesn’t detract from the uniqueness of my experience. I am not living their lives, and so I don’t know how it affected them. I only know how it affected me. It was a big deal to me. It was an experience that lives in my memory every day of my life.

So I intend in my next few posts to talk about Oxford and how I found it to be one of the most unique places on earth. I know that this blog was supposed to be dedicated primarily to poetry, but it is also dedicated to writing. To be honest, I really don’t feel like writing poetry right now, or using this experience again as a topic for my poetry. I feel like talking about it through prose, and maybe in the talking, I might be able to work out why it has had such a profound effect on me. It certainly couldn’t hurt. And in the process, if anybody out there is reading my blog, the worst thing that will happen is that you will learn a little more about the oldest English language university in the world and my experience of it. Or maybe you will die of boredom. I hope not. I’m hoping for the former.