Reading the Names

Here is the poem that I wrote about twenty years of working in the field of HIV/AIDS and the collective trauma that we have all experienced from losing so many friends. I was watching the reading of the names on 9/11 and it triggered the association of when, at the beginning of the epidemic, we would read the names of the people who died that year on December 1, World AIDS Day. Obviously, this was early in the epidemic when the list was short enough that it was possible to do so.

I lived in New York on 9/11 and my brother and sister in law worked in the World Trade Center that day. I was pregnant with my second son, Alex, and every time I took the subway, I thought, this could be it. There was an anthrax scare in New York at that time as well. I often think that those of us who were living in NYC when the World Trade Center fell also have a collective PTSD from having lived through that experience. We became kinder to one another. Tragedy does that, forms unusual bonds that spread, like a spider web, across unfamiliar terrain.

The poem is long; I will probably make it into a few separate, shorter poems, but that is my process, I write and then I edit.

I will post the poem as a separate entry.,