Saint Paul, MN
THE PULL
A 9/11 poem
Bodies of every size falling
at the same rate, no one
more or less anxious
to achieve the finality
of ground, all
equally compliant
or ineffectively resistant
to gravity’s
slippery slope.
Galileo would have been
pleased.
His thought experiment
conjured two bodies
(inanimate masses in his
pre-9/11 mindset)
of unequal weight
but linked. A mother,
for example, tightly
holding her child. They fall
as one body. Now suppose
the grip loosens, into
a clutched hand, a touch,
or only a look
across the uprushing air.
On the moon, they dropped
a feather and a metallic mass
that might have been
a bullet, or a cannon ball,
or some complex mechanism
of this age, which gravity
took impartially. (I see
the feather’s leaden descent,
as swift as any fall
through billows of smoke
onto the fear-thronged
streets below.)
ABOUT THE POET
Freeman Ng (www.AuthorFreeman.com) is a former Google software engineer and the author of Bridge Across the Sky, a YA verse novel based on the Chinese immigration experience through Angel Island (Atheneum Books for Young Readers); Basho’s Haiku Journeys, a haiku picture book (Stone Bridge Press); and Haiku Diem, a daily haiku feed. He’s also the co-author, with Peter Dale Scott, of Poetry and Terror: Politics and Poetics in Coming to Jakarta (Bloomsbury USA). Ripples, a picture book about gravitational waves and friendship written by Freeman and illustrated by Daniel Miyares, is forthcoming from Neal Porter Books in Fall 2027.
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