“I can do only two things for them/ describe this flight/ and not add a last line”

From Wislawa Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11,” translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczk:

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.
I can do only two things for them — 
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

Also at the Poetry Foundation, here’s a Mark Doty essay from 2006, prompted by this Szymborska poem and addressing the difficult “poem of witness,” which “requires a profound understanding of the ways in which pain refuses articulation and horror cancels out speech.”

At the New Yorker, a selection of poems that appeared in the magazine in the months after the attacks, and a slideshow of the magazine covers that have addressed 9/11.