By Kit-Bacon Gressitt/ExcuseMeImWriting.com
An annual remembrance of the 19 April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
Ladies and gentlemen and children: See before you the crumbled concrete and teddy bears, the wreaths and forlorn love notes, the postcards and classroom projects, the flags and bobbing balloons, the flowers and final farewells to one hundred, sixty-eight souls. Blown from the earth with a single obscene gesture, they were three months, they were seventy-two years, they were one and twenty-three and thirty-six and forty-two and fifty-five and sixty-seven; good ages all, now etched static on stones in perpetuity.
Ladies and gentlemen and children: Look at their faces, unprepared to be memorialized, giggling from family photos; posing for graduation pictures; caught unaware in backyard barbecue snapshots; accepting awards for deeds well done; squinting through sunglasses and wind-whipped hair; smiling from beneath coquette eyelids; flirting with a future that will remain unlived.
Ladies and gentlemen and children: Do they now soar on the wings of eagles? Do they join celestial choirs, belting out the blues for those left behind? Do they rest safely where a god is nigh? Do they fly wrapped in angels’ wings and draped in patriotic colors? Do they heed the solemn psalms we offer up, the precious quilts we stitch with tears, the “Taps” we sound in stolid sorrow?
Ladies and gentlemen and children: Do you know? Their memories will never leave us — children’s cries that faded before they could be found; a boot, impotent with only its warrior’s leg; the futile reach of a toddler’s severed hand; the sacrifice of a limb for life; the heart of one who would serve and protect gone limp as the baby’s body he cradled.
Ladies and gentlemen and children: Can you see? In the victims’ absence, a flag gently caresses a face of faith, memorializing last kisses never placed on loved ones’ lips. Children’s words, pure and simple, are searched for some serenity. Voices are joined to find a remnant of harmony in harrowed hearts. Hands are clasped, ribbons are donned and candles lighted to lead wounded survivors to comfort.
Ladies and gentlemen and children: Can we help but wonder just how great is the resilience of this human spirit? Can we help but question that a god would make such a day as April 19, 1995? And when the doubts are done, when grass grows where battlements once stood, can we find inspiration in the agony? Can we embrace the anguish of it all and fill the void with the wonder of hope and peace?
Ladies and gentlemen and children: Speak tenderly to the city and love each other well that darkness may not have its way.
Love,
K-B
Visit the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum
©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt
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OH yes the Federal Building where that day the FBI people decided not to go to work and the non Muslim mastermind Timmy McVeigh forgot to put the rear license plate on his get away car.