Response: What Made

One poem that really caught my attention was “What Made”, by Branden Stevens. The format, each line starting with “what made” was intriguing, and the fact that the entire poem consisted of questions was thought-provoking. This poem doesn’t just describe 9/11, it ponders the events that occurred on September 11 and the results. These are unanswerable questions, questions that people asked in the aftermath of the attacks and are still asking. Some of them don’t seem to need to be answered – for example, the penultimate line “What made this sudden yet apparent sense of American spirit that never existed before?” is questioning the surge of patriotism that swept the country after the attacks. Everyone accepted that the natural thing to do was to rally behind the country and wave the flag, instead of questioning why we should do this and what America did to provoke the attacks. The statement “What made the news rerun the footage repeatedly again as if they were the scenes of a bad car commercial?” reminded me of the media frenzy surrounding 9/11. For weeks, the newspaper and television was full of images of the place crashing into the World Trade Center, the Towers falling, the rubble, bodies. The event almost became a spectacle, something to entertain instead of a tragic event. This line just made me ponder the obsession we have with tragedy – the news is full of kidnappings and murder and horror, even where there isn’t a major even like 9/11. The line “What made our country increase security and make me feel so much safer?” made me ponder not why America increased security, but why it made me feel safer. What, really, has been done to protect us? As the final line says, “What makes us… think it couldn’t happen again?”