Poetry collection illuminating the state of America. The poem (in comments below) is titled Searchers, about the dogs trained to find survivors in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Handlers had to find volunteers to pretend to survivors as the dogs felt they had failed.
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We gave our dogs a button to sniff,
or a tissue, and they bounded off
confident in their training,
in the power of their senses
to re-create the body,
but after eighteen hours in rubble
where even steel was pulverized
they curled on themselves
and stared up at us
and in their soft huge eyes
we saw mirrored the longing for death: 2y
then we had to beg a stranger
to be a victim and crouch
behind a girder, and let the dogs
discover him and tug him
proudly, with suppressed yaps,
back to Command and the rows
of empty triage tables.
But who will hide from us?
Who will keep digging for us
here in the cloud of ashes? 2y