an essay by George Murray (excerpt)

So there I was, watching people choose between burning to death and falling 80 storeys to the pavement. They clung to the sides of the building as long as they could, then joined the ticker tape of falling papers. They jumped singly and in pairs, spinning aircraft with no one at the controls. Some of them trailed smoke on the way down, as though crashing after a dogfight. When they hit, they bounced. Each time someone jumped, I reached out with the rest of the crowd, as if I were a telekinetic who could stop the fall with the sheer force of a wish. Of course, we couldn’t, but it seemed reasonable to try at the time.

I was with a friend. I told her we had to leave. At that point, until those last seconds, it was still just a fire way up in a building. Who knew what would happen next? We walked to Broadway, about a hundred feet or so away. The ground began to rumble. People screamed. We crouched, holding each other, thinking another plane
was coming in. When we looked up, a column of debris and pulverized concrete raced at us, just like what you saw on TV. Later that night my wife would pick shards of glass and metal from my head with tweezers. In the movies, you can outrun explosions.

Everything became a darker grey in front of me. I ran with my shoulders up around my ears, certain the building was tipping and I was about to play weakling Atlas to a world of reinforced steel girders. Do you know what I thought of at that moment? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t poetry.

Flash forward two years. I was in a midwifery birthing-centre in lower Manhattan, watching my firstborn son’s head crown. Things had been going so well (at least from my non-split-in-half point of view). Suddenly, the midwife monitoring the baby’s vital signs raised an alarm. We were losing him. When his head emerged, we could see the cord was around his neck, cinched tight by his arm, which had become oddly trapped up under his chin. Seconds later, he was out, but without vital signs. The midwives whisked him and me into another room, leaving my bewildered partner to birth the placenta. A seemingly innocuous cupboard was opened and the hippity-dippity birthing centre transformed like a robot into a full neonatal unit.

The midwives began to resuscitate him. His eyes were open and he had a heartbeat, but was taking only very shallow breaths. He looked up calmly at the light with liquid black eyes peeking out of his little blue alien face. A midwife asked me if I had sung to him in utero. I had. Well, sing. Would you like to swing on a star, carry
moonbeams home in a jar . . . He turned his head to my voice and blinked those black eyes. He grew pinker. Poetry was the last thing on my mind then too.