Remembering the Heroes of 9/11

I read a poem called The First Response by Alan Siris. Alan was near Ground Zero and witnessed volunteers searching through the rubble for people. This makes the poem pretty personal, and very real. He recounts what he thought as he woke up, that it would just be a normal day. He tells of the heroes who raced up "those stairwells" to save others, even though it was clearly safer to stay away. He looks back upon how the sky looked then, all black with smoke. The thousands of funerals that took place one by one. He focuses a little on one firefighter who was searching through the rubble and was ready to serve on a moment's notice. This really touched me, and I wish I could have been there to volunteer to help. But, even with all the videos of the planes crashing, I will probably never know what it actually felt like, the terror, to see the what happened as it did.

The poem reminds me of a musical I recently saw, in fact, I've already written about it, Come From Away. I'll explain what happens in it again though, in case you haven't read it. Come From Away is about the small town of Gander, Newfoundland, and how it housed 7,000 people from 38 planes that were forced to land as the US airspace was closed directly after the events of 9/11. While the town people weren't necessarily at Ground Zero searching through the rubbles, they are still heroes, just like the ones that Alan Siris talks about in his poem. Gander and its people housed an amount of people that equalled their population and kept them safe, housed, healthy, and fed until they got home. They are heroes. The firefighters and volunteers who searched for other people on that day? They are also heroes. And we, as a nation and a community, will never forget their service.