Dirge for a Young Century

A Lament for the Terrorist Attack on New York 's Twin Towers

BY HUANG XIANG

In a dream

New York 's two great pointers are severed

The pain pierces me to the bone

Ships traveling the centuries about to sink

And I seem to face a horrible death by drowning

The twin skyscrapers

Are two masts

Abjectly teetering, hopeless

Are two antennae, newly broken,

That desperately call

To heaven for help

Under the clear sky Upon the Earth

Oh God, Oh God, Why, Why

Are You so completely silent

In the twin towers' savage destruction

My body within their massive forms

Collapses at the same time

They were “murdered”

And I am strangling

They suffer an attack

And blood flows like water from my gaping wounds

Their bones and sinews of steel bend and break

My whole skeleton.

What the towers have lost of themselves

I am now the less

They are leveled flat

And I am crushed to dust

I tell you loudly

I am the skyscrapers,

Proud pinnacles of earthly construction

New York 's landmark is the same as Beijing 's

Landmark, Tokyo 's, Paris 's, London 's

Landmarks.

The symbol of American civilization

Is the symbol of Chinese civilization.

Any American's misfortune disappearance

Or death

Is the misfortune disappearance and death of

All the people of the world

Everyone's life is equally precious

Equally precious is everyone's life

On the Earth Beneath the clear sky

Oh God I find

Posted along New York 's streets pictures of

More than 5,000 missing people

Every one of them is a missing relative I'm searching for

Every picture that stares at me is

Me myself.

I am the father of a child who

Lost a father,

The husband of a wife

Who lost her husband,

A mother who lost the child of a mother

Twin wings of smoke and flame

Envelope me

Incinerate me

It is the smoke of fires burning

Every continent

Every building

Every room

Every person on our planet

The two towering lute strings

That resounded across the skies

Have snapped within my body

And so within the bodies of all of you there is only

Silence

A living world has crashed down

Into the stillness of the oozing blood

As though the great King of Terror descended from the sky

The centuries-old prophesy of Nostradamus

Has been fulfilled

Remember this day Remember this day

In a memorandum on the history of mankind

Record this date

Remember this day Remember this day

The darkest moment of cosmic time

——September 11, 2001——

Oh God, Oh God I have faith in you, I call you to appear

Be with me Be with these silent votive candles

All things on Earth that once have died must forge their way

back through the bloody muck

Under the clear sky Upon the Earth

To go on living Forever and forever

SEPTEMBER 20, 2001

In New Jersey sunroom

Translated by: ANDREW G. EMERSON

Maplewood, N. J.

Last updated: March 15, 2005