In the three years since founding netpoets.com, I've largely managed to avoid using this web site as a platform for my personal views. Passions is a place not for preaching, but for sharing. This poem, I hope, is no different.

Yesterday was September 11, 2001.

When I was 13, I lived through the televised death of John Kennedy. Later, I lived through the atrocities of Vietnam, through Kent State, through mass murders and natural catastrophes. I've watched space shuttles explode on CNN and listened in horror as children killed other children in American schools. All of those appalling events of an imperfect world live with me, shaping the person I have become. But perhaps no other day in history has touched my heart in the same way as did yesterday.

Television stations in this country are calling it the "Attack on America," characterizing this senseless violence as a second Pearl Harbor, as a declaration of war. Maybe they're right. Yet, what I've seen in the past twenty-four hours within our own pipTalk forums convinces me they are, at best, only partially right. September 11 was an attack not just against America, but against the world.

If you don't believe me, ask Titia or Munda, poets from the Netherlands. Ask Melissa or Kit, from Canada, or Dee or Maree from Australia. Ask Kamla from New Zealand. Voices have been raised in England, in India, in Ireland, in Korea, and in dozens more nations across the planet. Our poetry is international, and so too is the compassion and outrage expressed by our poets. I am both humbled and incredibly proud of the people whom comprise Passions. They give me hope.

This poem originally was published in Poems on Life - Attack on America Poems