New Year 2005

May I write well this year and make a difference in my readers' minds and lives.

There is a great need in the world for earnestness, truth, honesty and trust. There seems to be little of it in today's world, when we can't believe in what we hear, see and often question what we even know within ourselves. Again the world seems to be mired in war physically, mentally and even spiritually. What we know within ourselves needs to be reinforced.

My intention is to take ideas, and create art and literature. I am an admirer of the craft of the writer Ernest Hemingway, when he was young and earnest and honest in writing and in his first love.

May I write well and create images and words of worth, and give people insight into what they truly know and feel within themselves.


January 1, 2005

I refer to September 11, 2001 often in my life since that fateful day. It seared itself in my heart's (and it seems soul's) memory.

If it is true that our soul (a spiritual consciousness) lives on beyond our existence here on earth, then there will be a whole world of people who will "know" September 11th into eternity. Some with great sorrow and loss, some with sadness, and charity of communal spirit, some with profound hated of America and Americans for what appears to me to be sins of the father.

Whereas many say that America deserved September 11th, and now in Iraq, all Americans should be killed by jihad to eliminate them from the entire Middle East, (because of all the injustices Americans have inflicted on the Middle East peoples for over the last century,) I say that no man ought to suffer for the sins of his father, nor the evils of the past, be they the sins of any man, group or government. We come into this world as innocents, we are taught hate and the excuses for destroying our preceived enemies of our lives, our tribe, our nation. I say enough!

I use to think that money obviously brings enemies together in peaceful co-exixtence in the end. Look at the US and Vietnam, and in weapons proliferation, China and Russia, France and Eqypt, etc., money exchanges hands and all hatred and past vicious warring is forgotten.

But years before the money exchanges hands, there ought to be some forgiveness and forgetting the sins of the father, for every person, people and nation on earth has indulged in this prelude to war and killing practice. Everyone should look inside and reflect on their true feelings of the loss of loved ones and honor those lost to us not in fear and thus hated and anger towards the enemy but towards how to best fill that emptiness now in our lives and hearts by creating a new gesture of extending the best of who we are truly out towards others.

Perhaps (and I am like most skeptical that human beings can do this) if we extended ourselves to our counter-part (who is not his father) next door or around the world, as we would the people we love today or have loved but lost, then perhaps we will have peace here on earth.

This poem speaks to that love that bound many people together on September 11th.

America, Within A Month of September 11th

"Like threads woven into a piece of fabric, we are a nation of extraordinary people. Though slashed and ripped, torn and scorched, every fiber holds fast at some point to another, entwined, enmeshed, single strands, though hanging severed apart, are still attached by a thread to others of a greater whole, not of what was, but of what is.

The living spoke in bittersweet tones, of youth and dreams, of loss and of found. They are the loose ends and they wonder why. No one anywhere knows why. Reason is not there or in the here and now. One of those living threads said as though reciting a creed, "When people are running out of burnng buildings, firemen run in..."

As woven but torn single threads who now forever remain, forget not to remember, to remember to look your loved one in his eyes, and tell him, tell him you love him, each and everyday you are alive. Yet forget not, to remember, to remember those fibers now threadbare, those who were torn apart amongst us, and those torn away who were slain."

Copyright 2001
Flora M. Cusumano





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