In a dream, asleep,
   New York’s two great pointers are severed
   The pain pierces me to the bone
   Ships traveling the centuries will be
    lost in an instant

   And I face a horrible death by drowning
   The twin skyscrapers
   Are two masts
   Abjectly teetering, hopeless
   Are two antennae, newly broken,
   That desperately call
   To heaven for help
   Under the sky Upon the Earth
   Oh, God Oh, God Why, Why
   Are You so completely silent?
   In the twin towers’ savage destruction
   My body within their massive forms
   Collapses at the same time
   They were “murdered”
   And I am strangling
   They suffer an attack
   And blood flows like water from my gaping
    wounds
   Their bones and sinews of steel bend and
    break
   My whole skeleton.
   What the towers have lost of themselves
   I am now the less
   They are leveled flat
   And I am crushed to dust
   I tell you
   I am the proud pinnacle of
   Earthly construction, these towers
   New York’s landmark is the same as
    Beijing’s landmark, Tokyo’s, London’s
   Landmarks.
   The symbol of American civilization
   Is the symbol of Chinese civilization.
   Any American’s misfortune, disappearance
   And death
   Is the misfortune, disappearance death of
   All the people of the world
   Everyone’s life is equally precious
   Equally precious is everyone’s life
   On the Earth Beneath the sky
   Oh, God I find
   Posted along New York’s streets pictures of
   More than 5,000 missing people;
   
   Every one of them is a missing relative of mine.
   Every picture that stares at me is
   Me myself.
   I am the father of a child who
   Lost his father,
   The husband of a wife
   Who lost her husband,
   A child who lost the mother of a child.
   Twin wings of smoke and flame
   Envelope me
   Incinerate me
   It is the smoke of fires burning
   Every continent
   Every building
   Every room
   Every person on our planet
   The two lute strings of the towers
   That resounded across the skies
   Have snapped within my heart
   And so within the bodies of all of you there is
    only
   Silence
   A living world has crashed down
   From its height into the stillness of the oozing
    blood
   As though the great King of Terror descended
    from the sky
   The centuries-old prophesy of Nostradamus
   Has been fulfilled
   Remember this day Remember this day
   In a memorandum on the history of mankind
   Record this date
   Remember this day Remember this day
   September 11, 2001
   Oh, God Oh, God I have faith in you, I invoke
    your glorious name
   Be with me Be with these silent praying
   candles
   All things on Earth that have died must forge
    their way back through the bloody muck
   Under the sky Upon the Earth
   To go on living Forever and forever
   
   
   SEPTEMBER 20, 2001
   In New Jersey Sun-Room
   
   Translated by: ANDREW G. EMERSON
   Maplewood, N. J.