story7706.xml

story7706.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-17

As the hours of horror crept by and the images on the television became an series of searing images in my brain and mind, I struggled with what sort of response my country should make to such unthinkable evil. Each hour brought more certainty to me that the entire nature of the American people had been so completely misread and thoroughly misunderstood by whoever was responsible as to have created a mindset in which they thought Americans too weak or pampered and the United States too politically disordered to respond. On September 12, that thought became a poem in my mind about who we are and the depths of the American will to find those responsible and root out this evil at its source, and I wrote out the words. If it speaks to you of a sense of the American spirit, please feel free to keep it and send it to friends.

 YOU DO NOT KNOW ME
September 12, 2001

You do not know me.
I live on quiet tree-lined streets
Whose branches overarch the roadway
Giving shade to all who walk there
In every city of this land.

You do not know me.
My father gave his c-rations to a starving child in Germany.
My brother gave his chocolate bars to hungry Vietnamese
children
My son gave a blanket to a shivering twelve year-old Iraqi
soldier who surrendered
Half a world away--for desert nights are deep and cold.

You do not know me.
In my time we have ended the horrors of death by
diphtheria, smallpox, polio,
Found the causes of malaria and cholera,
Given humans new hearts and kidneys when their own have
faltered,
Created medicines to help the afflicted of mind and body,
Grown new strains of food enriched with special elements to
nourish hungry people,
Walked on the moon,
And danced in the interstices of heaven.

You do not know me.
I have seen vast oceans of wheat growing in our heartland
That will feed those suffering from drought in Ethiopia,
Civil war in Rwanda,
Hungering multitudes in Bosnia, Kosovo, Bangladesh, and
Haiti,
People suffering from flood in China,
or failure of a harvest in Russia.

You do not know me.
I have heard the endless sound of silence in purple-
spangled mountain spaces,
The sound of wind through boughs of pine on high desert
mesas aromatic with sage,
The babble on streets of great cities that never sleep,
The endless din of steel poured, coal mined, automobiles
manufactured,
And the first cry of my grandchild as she came from the
body of her mother,
And in that sound saw all I am stretch before me into the
infinity of tomorrow.

You do not know me.
I have worked hard,
Typed a million million words in offices of schools and
courts,
Raised children,
Supported the building of my church,
Given what I could to the hungry and homeless whose need I
see around me,
Cared for a parent dying of Alzheimer?s disease,
And bottle-fed abandoned new-born kittens who arrived
unheralded to share my years.

I have known the beauty of tolerance,
The joys of working together,
And the strength of community.
I love three things beyond life or the telling of it:
My family, my country, and my God.

You do not know me.
You do not know that all these things have shaped a
steadfast heart
That will freely yield them up
If by doing so I can at last insure
The freedom to walk my tree-lined streets in shade,
Hear the sounds of wind in desert spaces,
Feed the hungry,
Raise my children,
Care for my parents,
And love my family,
My country,
And my God.


?-Diane Spencer Pritchard--