ORANGE RIBBONS: September 12, 2001
By Patricia Wellingham-Jones

Kids in the Dunsmuir High School cafeteria

spend lunch hour, home room time

with scissors, tiny gold pins and yards

of narrow orange satin ribbon.

When the simple loops

pile up like tangerines

in a tropical marketplace

they take handfuls, stuff pockets,

fill a pretty basket, head into town.

Before the sun sinks behind cedars

and hemlocks bow their drooping heads

and the September horror ends

its second day, every person

in the small mountain town—

just-born infant to war-torn graybeard—

wears the symbol. After orange flames

burst through those twin towers and

blasted thousands of lives

apart,

the orange ribbons tie a town

together.

Patricia Wellingham-Jones is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, author of Don’t Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer, Apple Blossoms at Eye Level, and Welcome, Babies as well as editor of Labyrinth: Poems & Prose. She has been published widely in print and online journals and anthologies.