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Join the Discussion • Two Lines for Peace “Here is an idea: Write a two-line poem that will foster peace in the world.”   --Pixordia

Elsewhere at About • Links for more info from About U.S. Government Info

Elsewhere on the Web • “The eerily intimate power of poetry to console” from The New York Times (free registration required to read articles) • Four poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Marianne Moore, Carlos Drummond de Andrade & Czeslaw Milosz, collected by Robert Pinsky in Slate • “Auden on Bin Laden” by Eric McHenry in Slate • “Poems for the Time,” anthology collected by Alicia Ostriker in Moby Lives • “Poetry and Tragedy,” reactions & poems from the recent Laureates in USA Today • “American Terror, writings in the immediate aftermath,” special issue of Masthead • Responses to the tragedy: Poems Found & a collaborative crisis poem at People's Poetry Gathering site

Dear Friends -- we're camping out on Duane St w/o phone/electric but lives yes just live em till till, I guess. I'm at my dear brother's office on 20th St -- Internet, phone, hooray!

Yesterday, Elizabeth looked me in the eye and said, Do not withdraw! The first time anyone's ever had the nerve to say that to me (the other side of my maniae, donchaknow). It was amazing to hear. I heard. And I recommend it to everyone. Do not withdraw!

The horrors are everywhere; it is incomprehensible. It is bitter and ugly and sad and the concrete -- the streets they are the same but what's on them now are vehicles of death and pollution, of clean up and try to wash off the stench of destruction. This is hard to imagine in my City, my beautiful City full of energy and sharp beauty.

The smell is powerful, acrid; masks are important. I ride my bike, checkpoint at 14th is calm, Houston is tough, Canal varies. I have not walked below Duane. The rubble of 7WTC still smolders at the end of Greenwich St, 5 blocks away.

Rumors fly about why there's no electric -- gas leaks was the leading reason until I turned on my gas and it worked. The giant floodlights at night maybe? -- they get direct hooks, perhaps that's why the neighborhood's unplugged.

Hard to do anything. I missed my class at Bard on Wednesday but I do find the books we're reading (Eco's The Island of the Day Before and Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You) soothing.

One thing -- we don't think of when things will return to Normal. There's a new normal now, with tentacles in many directions and time is needed to grip them, for them to grip us and each other. Don't withdraw. Use words.

Bob Holman
9.13.2001

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