Myrna Goldstein adjusts one of the T-shirts, with her poem insipred by 9/11 attacks, that she and partner Gerardina Zeccola are currently selling at the exchange/commissary complex at Aviano Air Base, Italy. (Kent Harris / S&S)
AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy — The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were felt around the world.
That included an American free-lance journalist and entrepreneur living in Perugia, an Italian city a little more than an hour’s drive north of Rome.
Myrna Goldstein wrote down her thoughts in a poem shortly after the attacks. Then she put the paper away in a drawer. Gerardina Zeccola, her business partner, found it there and thought the words — and sentiment — deserved some attention.
So the two, with the help of a graphic artist friend, decided to put the poem on a T-shirt. The words, in blue ink, are arranged in the form of a pair of towers against a white background.
The poem begins:
“Nothingness flew on jagged breezeCrashed into the steely treesSo tall they grazed the hem of GodWho was not fazed by the lightning rodsOf hate and murder …”
“Everyone wears T-shirts,” Zeccola said Tuesday while selling the shirts in the commissary/exchange complex at Aviano. “Everyone looks at T-shirts. To me, this message on the shirt says that we should never forget.”
Goldstein said some proceeds from the shirts, which sell for 38 euros each, would be sent to a foundation set up in New York City after the attacks.
“We’re not sure how much yet, because we just started selling them,” she said. So far, they’ve sold them in Vicenza and Aviano.
The two partners, who run a business called Euroglobal Communications, have sent copies of the poem to New York Governor George Pataki and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
“Both of them loved the poem,” Goldstein said.
She said she hopes to get the words written on a plaque.
“Our dream is to have it put on the plaza at ground zero,” she said.
