Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Today, we remember the 3,000 innocent people murdered by Islamist fanatics seven years ago. Rainy Day dedicates Riding the Elevator Into the Sky by Anne Sexton, with all its mystical imagery, to those who suffered and are still suffering because of the 9/11 atrocity.

Riding the Elevator Into the Sky

As the fireman said:
Don't book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them.
As the New York Times said:
The elevator always seeks out
the floor of the fire
and automatically opens
and won't shut.
These are the warnings
that you must forget
if you're climbing out of yourself.
If you're going to smash into the sky.

Many times I've gone past
the fifth floor,
cranking toward,
but only once
have I gone all the way up.
Sixtieth floor: small plants and swans bending
into their grave.
Floor two hundred:
mountains with the patience of a cat,
silence wearing its sneakers.
Floor five hundred:
messages and letters centuries old,
birds to drink,
a kitchen of clouds.
Floor six thousand:
the stars,
skeletons on fire,
their arms singing.
And a key,
a very large key,
that opens something —
some useful door —
somewhere —
up there.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Riding the Elevator Into the Sky, written by Anne Sexton some 40 years before 9/11, is, in the light of what happened on that day, heart-breakingingly apposite.