Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. Thursday marks 24 years since September 11, 2001, and this week native New Yorker Will Rahn reflects on that day, its aftermath, and the poem by W.H. Auden that helped him put himself back together. 

The best views of the New York skyline are from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a narrow, bench-lined park along the East River. I came to this conclusion the first time I sat there, on my first day of high school, having lunch with schoolmates I’d just met. 

The date was September 10, 2001. I’d never seen the Twin Towers from the Brooklyn side, and I remember thinking—for whatever morose, anxious reason—that they dwarfed the rest of Lower Manhattan to such a degree that, should they fall to the side, they would wipe out all of downtown. In 1993, a group of terrorists had tried to do just that, detonating a massive truck bomb in the garage under one of the towers.  

Although the attack killed six people, it also reinforced the view, common at the time, that the buildings were effectively indestructible. On the morning of the 11th, huddled around a radio in the school basement, my new classmates and I learned that, like every other structure made by man, they could indeed fall. 

Much has been written about the days and weeks following 9/11 in New York City. The terrible smell caused by fires that would burn for months. The photos of the missing, posted all over by families who hoped that their loved ones had somehow made it out of the towers but not yet made it home. 

New Yorkers didn’t know how to respond to the attacks. The city had never been friendlier; people would say hello to strangers on the sidewalk like they were old friends. But we all expected more attacks were coming, that 9/11 wasn’t a one-off but mere prelude to a siege. New Yorkers of a historical bent turned their minds to The Blitz of London, to the way the British stood up against oblivion.  

The much-emailed poem of that moment was “September 1, 1939,” W.H. Auden’s reflections—written as a British expat in New York—on the start of World War II. Auden wrote of the end of “a low dishonest decade” (the 1930s for him, the ’90s for us) and “the unmentionable odour of death” that “offends the September night.” ...