IN REMEMBRANCE

Here's an excerpt from my long poem MARCH 18, 2003, written for a reading that happened to occur the evening before we invaded Iraq but pretty well predicted much of what happened. It was a series of questions that take at least twenty minutes to read (you can hear the audio of that reading on my CD LOST ANGELS). This excerpt isn't about that though, but about my take then on what this day brings up for many of us:

"Or is that just me because I've seen
a lot of people pass, or die, as you might say,
from one thing or another, including my mother
in a way that seemed unfair and certainly
unnecessary and arbitrary and cruel?
But what death isn't?
Those I remember that were no surprise,
though devastating anyway in their
now-you-see-me
now-you-never-will-again
finality?
Is that why now it's life I'm obsessed with?
Or is that because when I watched
the second plane crash into the second tower on TV
a thin blue tube hung from my urethra,
attached to a clear plastic bag, the remnant of a
cancer operation the week before,
unaware an old friend was on that flight,
at that moment incinerated,
a woman who was kind to me when
she didn't need to be?
How many people have died
before you got the chance to tell them what you meant to?"