Billy Collins – Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe of Sept. 11, which was nothing less than a psychic invasion of the United States, many people I know turned intuitively to poetry as a source of sanity and perhaps even consolation. Poetry has always accommodated loss and keening; it may be said to be the original grief counseling center. But American poets will have a hard time if they attempt a direct response to these events, because poetry by its nature moves us inward, not outward to the public and the collective.

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

— Reprinted from Sailing Alone Around the Room, Random House, 2001.