New Yorker, Poet Nancy Mercado Reads ‘Going to Work’

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• RAY SUAREZ:

  I'm a New Yorker. As a teenager, I watched the Twin Towers being built. In the tough economic times of the late '70s, I strolled the World Trade Center food court and the underground shopping mall on my way to sign for an unemployment check.

  I've covered news conferences in Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower. It was hard to believe such enormous, solid, seemingly permanent buildings, could collapse. To this day, I feel their absence whenever I approach the city from Brooklyn or New Jersey.

  Poet Nancy Mercado, a fellow New Yorker, felt compelled to write about what she lost when the towers came down.

• NANCY MERCADO, poet:

  "Going to work."

  On their daily trips

  Commuters shed tears now

  Use American flags

  Like veiled women

  To hide their sorrows

  Rush to buy throwaway cameras

  To capture your twin ghosts

  Frantically I too

  Purchase your memory

  On postcards & coffee mugs

  In New York City souvenir shops

  Afraid I'll forget your facade

  Forget my hallowed Sunday

  Morning PATH Train rides

  My subway travels through

  The center of your belly

  Day after day

  Afraid I'll forget your powers

  To transform helicopters

  Into ladybugs gliding in the air

  To turn New York City

  Into a breathing map

  To display the curvature

  Of our world