In the weeks after September 11, 2001, Georgia Heard was invited to share "poems of comfort" with children who witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center. Here, she has chosen 18 poems that offer children and adults the opportunity to share feelings of fear and sadness, and also, importantly, hope. "I do not want / fire screaming up the sky. / I do not want / families killed in their doorways....Life is for us, and is shining. / We have a right to sing" writes Gwendolyn Brooks in "A Little Girls' Poem." And from Nancy Wood in her poem "Strengthen the Things That Remain," young readers and listeners are reminded that "A tree is still a tree and a rock is still a rock. A warbler / sings its familiar song and coyotes howl / in disconcerting harmony....Patterns persist, / life goes on, whatever rises will converge." Each of the eighteen poems in the book is paired with a stunning visual interpretation by a noted artist of books for children. (Ages 5-11)

In September of 2001, New York poetry anthologist Georgia Heard was asked to compile a collection of poems of comfort for schoolchildren in lower Manhattan. The result is this volume full of richly diverse and powerfully life-affirming verse.