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Home » 2008 » #768 » Cultural Dissent » The Bones of September

Mitchel Cohen

Two vast and trunkless legs of steel

Like silent Pharaohs over Wall Street stood

Scraping the vast canvas of immortality

@poetry = How many died erecting those towers:

Welders of iron, exoskeletal beams?

Manhattan is missing her two front teeth

Can you help me find them?

@poetry = What were their thoughts on that morning’s long fall?

Beat, you wings! Just another few breaths!

Millions of fingers of Flesh, of Memory ?

Sift and sift that ancient dust

@poetry = Manhattan is missing her two front teeth

Help me find them!

@poetry = Now, only a torn, disfigured pedestal remains

And on it these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.*

@poetry = Autumn, impervious,

Mocking our imperial pretense,

Swirls her bluest skirt, whips her hips,

Casts the bones of September

Like I-Ching sticks over Baghdad

Throwing sunsets to die for.

@auth poem = Mitchel Cohen

[The author is a member of the Red Balloon Poetry Conspiracy, and Brooklyn Greens
*Stanza recycled from Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1817. This poem is reprinted from Mitchel Cohen’s The Permanent Carnival, 2006.]