Today has run the gamut between really great and really,
really terrible - maybe not in that order. I began the day in a heap on the floor. Honestly. After my children left
for school I decided to read my cousin Amanda’s blog post about 9/11 which was
both wonderful and thoughtful and so very, very hard for me to remember through
her writing. It’s pretty much the
same every year – I brace for this day to come and then I relive September 11,
2001 in brief segments throughout the day all the while trying to avoid any TV
news. I generally hate this day,
and twice now in the past several years I’ve had Writing Project events held on
September 11th. My Writing Project friends have
become like a second family to me, so tonight I was really looking forward to being
with them.
Because tonight was a “guest night” for people interested in
going through next summer’s summer institute, my friend Melanie presented her
inquiry workshop so that people could get a little taste of what we do in the
SI. One of the activities she had us do was something called “blackout poetry”. We were to take a piece
of writing and black out (or use a marker to cover) words we didn’t need –
making a poem, of sorts. The original piece of writing we used was this Nobel
Prize lecture by Elie Wiesel. I came up with a piece that I really liked – here
it is:
humanity dominated the
universe.
the very laws of
nature had evolved.
remember,
bear witness to
dignity,
listen, believe, and
comprehend.
the strength to
rebuild is possible.
We all shared our “poems” and we talked a bit about the
words we chose. While we were sharing, my friend Scot took my paper, crossed
out the original title “Hope, Despair and Memory” and simply wrote,
“9/11”. He handed it back to me
and it nearly took my breath away. I wasn’t prepared for it, I guess. He
whispered to me, “well, this has obviously been on your mind and I figured you
were writing about it.”
I wasn’t. But I kind of love that someone thought these
lovely words would come from my angry heart. I mostly thought that Wiesel’s
writing was so awful…such a terrible comment on humanity that I had to change
or at least make it more positive. I suppose it’s also a comment on today as
well. I hadn’t thought about it
like that, but I’m glad someone else did.
