Hits: 86
WPCNR LAKE STREET WHITE PLAINS NEW YORK USA. By John f. Bailey:
It was a beautiful morning today.
Like the morning 23 years ago when events made this day, September 11, a day of infamy like Pearl Harbor changed the world and this country forever.
It is the day when the city holds the Community Gathering of Remembrance of 9/11 in Liberty Park.
No one needs pictures to remember that day or needs to watch television replays.
Those who saw the World Center towers fall into rubble like my wife, and I who could not watch the television reports, but listened to the radio reports of the dying of thousands on the site and haunting lives of thousands more since that day, remember it every day
In White Plains New York USA , we lost 6 of those thousands of innocent victims
They are because they will always be our citizens, Sharon Balkcom, Marisa Dinardo, Hemanth Kumar Putter, Joe Riverso, Gregory Rodriguez and Linda Sheehan immortalized in this memorial where wreaths were placed by Mayor Thomas Roach and the Common Couuncil as they do every year this day.
Christine Mann, Cellist began the sensitive prelude music with melancholy mellow notes of sensitive quietly comforting strains across the little glen by the beautiful lake, one of the melodies was Yesterday
Ms Mann’s artistry created a just right atmosphere of loss, strength and courage to go on that is the legacy of 9/11
Phylisha Villanueva, Poet Laureate of Westchester County read a masterpiece of a narrative poem written about that morning 23 years ago that moved the gathering by her striking word pictures of emotions and anguish and message
She began reciting, that beautiful still morning like today’s “A day I will never forget,” images sharply depicting the plane hitting the 24th floor and her father getting out then having to go back the next day.
Images and feelings of that day were movingly created: Workers in the building who stayed behind, throwing themselves out of the building “ twisting and turning, looking like Superman,” and “ a couple holding hands” as they leapt together. Workmen going back every day for three years, and ending with no truer legacy of 9/11, that we “are made stronger than strong,” the last words of this epic: “Be Brave. Be Brave Be Brave”
Mayor Thomas Roach in his Welcome & Reflections observed that today was the nicest day of the summer, cool an beautiful as the day of 9-11. Mayor got right to the point: “Seeing the horror, I thought it is a call to make things better, and what will we do to make things better for the world and a little bit better for other people.” The Mayor also saluted the police and fire personnel attending the Rembrance since ”they serve to make things better for people every day.”
I felt that this was one of the most evocative of the spirit positivity of rememberance of this sad day as I have see.
The ceremony will be rebroadcast on www.wpcommunitymedia.org.