Peace
Collage and Poetry by Kathy Cotton
Collage: 911 Trinity Root
Memorial to Peace
The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace. --MINORU YAMASAKI, Twin Towers Architect
I hear Yamasaki’s towering words,
four decades past, now sifting through
Manhattan’s cenotaphic forest:
Peace, he says. World peace.
Windborne from the lone Survivor Tree
and snagged in peeling bark of white oaks
newly planted by the hundreds:
World peace.
And clear I hear his words, waterfalling
into thunder, 30 feet below the street—
a nation’s acre-wide reflecting pools
in footprints where his Twin Towers fell:
World peace.
I hear the wind and rain, the ghosted voices
carry off his lofty words to neighborhoods,
and scatter them like ash, like seed on street
and schoolyard, synagogue and mosque and chapel,
over names as mixed as thousands scribed
in bronze, end to end on parapets.
World peace,
he whispered over dreams and blueprints,
words hammered into sky-high buildings,
slammed to cindered bones and twisted steel
but spoken still and heard in tiny conversations
by neighbors black and white and brown,
stranger to stranger, language to language,
small daily furrows of understanding
plowed into this world of rubble,
our little words of kindness, sowing
peace, world peace.
by Kathy Cotton, Published in NFSPS Encore Prize Poems, 2013
