Promise me that you will always be outraged
on days like today
when smoke corrupts the lungs of people already breathless from the urge to live, live, live.
Promise me you will never bury your head in your hands
and, in the darkness, forget that there are people trying to put out our communal light.
Promise me that, tomorrow, we will be better,
that we will declare, with both fist and open hand raised at the heavens, that we do not accept a world
built on rubble and bodies and the ashes of our fellow man.
It is here, in the intimate aftermath of disaster, that we pull together and resolve to rescue our people from a history measured in blood the way you measure a child’s height on the wall it does not scare us.
Today, we do not shy away from the brave people who ran for life and kept running,
onward to hospitals and clinics to give life out of their very veins they sacrifice and they provide
because that is our nature.
When one of us has fallen,
ten million rise to help him up or so the stories go
am I mistaken?
Today, we are all Boston,
New York, Baghdad, Somerset, Hanoi, Dresden, Hiroshima, Saigon, Kabul, Washington —
one vessel of self-inflicted agony, blown to bits and scattered over the wide and harrowed surface of the Earth.
Everyone: grab some glue and get to work.