Yet, beginning on the very day of the tragedy, when the distraught and bereaved began scrawling messages in the ash, and a student from NYU laid out a sheet of butcher block paper in Union Square, New Yorkers broke the silence with stories, poems, rituals and commemorative art. At the heart of the response were words -- words at first written in the dust near Ground Zero, on Missing Posters, makeshift memorials, scraps of paper posted on telephone booths, on index cards in Times Square, attached to ribbons on Canal Street, in chalk on the sidewalk, on firehouse walls.

The idea to build the towers back up in the way that only poets can—in words—came a few weeks later. Each poem tower would be 110 lines, one for each story of the Trade Towers. As word got out about the Twin Towers of Words, poets from all over the world submitted lines to our web site, www.peoplespoetry.org. For the second tower, we invited 110 established poets to contribute a line. Adrienne Rich, Robert Creeley, and Galway Kinnel were among the contributors. The two word towers—along with poetry from the shrines—were mounted as part of our traveling exhibit, Missing: Streetscape of a City in Mourning, at the New York Historical Society through July 7th. Below is a graphic image of the "word towers" that hang in the Missing exhibit-long, black, billowing cotton banners that were placed near a fountain toward the end of the exhibit. The towers are over 25-ft tall and these are only 15 inches high, but they should give you a sense of how they look in the show. The full text of the poem is on our PDF file, which includes poet Bob Holman's introductory comments, as well as citations for each of the lines.