September 11, 2015

Been thinking the past few days and today about Christoffer M. Carstenjen and Steve Adams two young men who were killed on September 11, 2001.

I’ll be spending today quietly, thinking and doing “normal” things. That’s always the contrast isn’t it, what had been normal and this instant where the world becomes something else, something unknown until now. Something perhaps unimaginable but now sitting quite real in the world, alongside us.

Here is an essay about poetry in times like this with with links to some good poems including โ€œPhotograph from September 11. (audio version)โ€

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 compelled me to rethink everything I thought I knew, and made me want to learn more, to read outside whatever borders I had created for myself. Not to be more American, but to be a better citizen, a better denizen of the planet. To go global and be local, to go ancient and be modern, to question all certainties and embrace what I did not know, to read Rumi and Isaiah, Rushdie and Roy and even Al-Qaeda, to listen to Springsteen and Kulthum, to refuse the elixir of fundamentalisms, to translate and be translated again by what I could not yet understand. To tattoo “Oye” on my body. To listen. โ€” Philip Metres, Beyond Grief and Grievance, The poetry of 9/11 and its aftermath.

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One Response to September 11, 2015

  1. Betty says:

    Certainly time to reflect on life. Do our best. Think of others.

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