I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

In September 2001, while I sat at a stoplight on Carrollton Avenue in New Orleans, a morning radio DJ announced, this just in.

A plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

His co-host joked the pilot needed to check his vision.

They both laughed.

It felt inappropriate.

But I guess morning DJs are paid to get our day off right,

to make us laugh on the way to work.

I was heading to teach a poetry writing course at Xavier University.

Sometime during my class, my Blackberry went off.

It was my wife.

Through tears, she asked that I come home.

Like the Kennedy assassination for my parents' generation,

mine will always remember and recall where we were on 9-11. Our country changed the moment those planes broke glass and sent us reeling into a long war.

9-11 also inaugurated the establishment of a new, more advanced surveillance state

in the interest of enhancing national security.

It is a historic moment that will long be memorialized, studied, and debated.

For that reason, poems too, will continue to be written about that fateful day. Poems about public events offer reflection. They counter

political and media rhetoric that aims to simplify.

Writing poems gives citizens in a democracy a place at the table of ideas and grants us a way to engage that promotes justice and civic dialogue.

Today's poem emphasizes the indelible impact of global events such as 9-11

on our collective memory, how we are reminded of our lack of innocence. But the poem also signals

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