Can I nominate you for our next Poet Laureate of the U.S.? Your work, this love-work, is a thing of incredible beauty and sorrow, a proper container for our national memory of that day.

Thank you.

.

I'm balling my eye's out...Thank you Gerald for one of the most touching poems I've ever felt.

That day shook me to my soul, and you've managed to put my soul's silent screams into words.

I consider finding this site and you, one of the best things that's happened to me.
I thank you again.

"No sanctuary other than despair."

Poet of terror.

And rage to last us a lifetime.

Thank you for putting my thoughts and rage into indelible words Gerard.

It compensates for the 45 minutes of disingenuous bullshit that I listened to last night from 'The Leader of The Free World'. He must be removed from office, soonest! Your work should assist in that noblest of aims.

This is among your best work ever. You should be proud of this one.

Magnificent.

JWM

As some of you may be aware, The Won is seeking to desecrate 9/11 as a "Day of National Service" instead, with the excuse that "We need to move on".

I recall, years ago when we were toppling the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar whining to some journalist that we should "Get over it!".

To which my response must be not only "No!", but "Hell No!!!".

Like many, I was at work on that day, learning of it when co-workers told me to check out CNN on the internet, and watched it play out, watching with horror when the buildings collapsed with so many still inside.

The next day, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, normally a fairly angry liberal, wrote a column ( reproduced at WTC Trbute - We'll Go Forward From this Moment ) in which he observed...

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We're frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae -- a singer's revealing dress, a ball team's misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We're wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though -- peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people -- you, perhaps -- think that any or all of this makes us weak. You're mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.

And concluded with...

So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that's the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange:

But you're about to learn.

THIS is how I'll remember 9/11, for a VERY long time to come.

@JWM - Thank you for posting the words of Leonard Pitts. Gave me goosebumps.

Hug.