Because a puppy is now! while the news
is grief for yesterday and fear
for tomorrow, we drive to the animal shelter
the Sunday after the towers collapse.
The shelter is packed with children
eager to make a dog wag its tail
or be licked by a cat’s sandpaper tongue.
Parents who had said no or when you’re older
are eager to give their kids something
to watch besides the rising toll.

I’d heard the news in the car as I drove home
from my second radiation treatment
and it seemed unreal at first, unreal
as the news in August when a smiley-face
computer voice announced, “lYou’ve got cancer!”
—unreal until the surgeon cut
the nodule from my breast and I could feel
the tender reality. It’s small, he said,
a pea or a pearl, or a nuclear reactor I thought
and where else are they lurking, these ticking bombs?

September explosions and the thousands dead
make the threat inside my body seem smaller,
so we stop in front of a sleepy chocolate pointer
with white patches on her face and chest
and the tip of her tail. Careful for the stitches
in her belly, we place her on the table where she
shakes off sleep and invites us to fall in love.
Before we walk out with her in my arms, a sign
warns, “Are you ready for a fifteen-year commitment?”
and I say sure, I’ll take it—give me fifteen years.

© 2003, Patti Tana
(from her book Make Your Way Across This Bridge: New & Selected Writings, Whittier Publications, 2003—
listen to her reading of “Because” online at her Web site)

we breathed you in
the air we breathed
the day you burned
you fell you flew
through new york air
in clouds of smoke
the clouds we feared
when first we saw
the desert fire
and thought oh no
not me not here
not where I am
I want to be
not here not me

now your souls
reside inside
our cells our thoughts
our souls made room
for you your life
cut short made dumb
my tongue your tongue
to speak your pain
your love your life
became our life
you dwell in us
my body your body
my hand your hand
take heart dear ones
we breathe you in

© 2010, Patti Tana

Patti Tana is Professor of English at Nassau Community College (SUNY). The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association selected her Long Island Poet of the Year 2009. She is an associate editor of Long Island Quarterly and editor of the Songs of Seasoned Women poetry anthology. Her eighth collection of poems, Any Given Day, appeared in 2011 from Whittier Publications.

Poems After the Attack collection > Table of Contents