OPINION: 25 years on, a nation still mourns

People pause as they stand at the memorial during a ceremony commemorating the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center at the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum on September 11, 2026 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America hide caption

toggle caption

Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

Yesterday marked a quarter century since the 9-11 terrorist attacks. I still remember — I will always remember —walking the streets of Lower Manhattan through rows of faces in photographs pasted on lampposts and walls with urgent, wrenching words:

"Have you seen my wife?" "Last seen, 8:20 AM, Tuesday." "Have you seen our daughter?" "…our father?" "…my best friend?"

The question marks pierced into you like hooks.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were attacks on America. But America is made up of the world.

The 2,977 people who were killed that day included people from more than 90 nations -- Canada, India, Great Britain, South Korea, the Dominican Republic and more. That's America.

This week, I remembered a poem dedicated to the 43 members of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union who came to work that morning at Windows on the World restaurant, atop the World Trade Center's North Tower. None of them survived the tower's collapse.

The poem is called 'Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100', by Martín Espada. It reads, in part:

Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.

Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning, where the gas burned blue on every stove and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers, hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans. 

Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime of his dishes and silverware in the tub.

Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher who worked that morning because another dishwasher could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.

Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.

After the thunder wilder than thunder, after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows- 

Twenty-five years later, we still shudder to think of that day, and pause to praise those we lost in that thunder.

Excerpted from Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002. Copyright (c) 2003 by Martín Espada. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.