In the days and weeks after his son was listed as missing in the attack on the World Trade Center, Kazusada Sumiyama was in agony. He went to New York in hopes of finding some answers, but came back with nothing.

Back in Tokyo, he would ride the commuter train to and from his office each day, anguish consuming him.

But then he began turning the images churning through his head into poems, converting his pain and despair into vignettes that helped him heal.

To mark the passing of two years since the death of his 34-year-old son, Yoichi, Sumiyama this month put his traditional-style short poems together in a collection published as ``Odes to the Soul of Ground Zero.''

``Feelings inside me started popping up. I began searching for words in my head,'' he said in an interview with The Associated Press before leaving Tuesday for New York to attend the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

``I want the families of the other victims to read it.''

Sumiyama's son was among the 24 Japanese killed in the attacks. He had been working for the New York branch of Fuji Bank, which had 700 employees in the World Trade Center.

Six Americans working for the bank died, along with Yoichi and 11 other Japanese.
Sumiyama, who at 66 recently retired from a patent research firm, said he had not intended to publish his poems at first.

But he decided to self-publish 1,500 copies _ at a cost of 1.5 million yen (US$13,000) _ because he wanted to share his feelings with other victims' families and to remind his countrymen that the attacks were not merely something that happened far away across the ocean.

``I wanted the Japanese to see this not in the third person,'' he said.
Sumiyama's 68 poems are painfully personal.

In one, he deals with the surreal feeling of watching the live, televised images of the twin towers on fire and then, four days later, being there, visiting New York hospitals in search of his son.

``Trees lit up with sunshine,
Flags now at half-mast and
The seasonal wind blows tender.
Why is the City of Sorrow
So beautiful today?''
He said the attacks have shattered his faith in peace. In the opening chapter he wrote"``My son was lost
Forever at the Twin Towers,
Although fervent has been
My wish for a serene world
Without war and without weapons.''

Even so, another poem relates that, in the aftermath of the attacks, there has also been joy.

Yoichi's wife, Harumi, was three months pregnant with their third child at the time of the attacks. She gave birth to a baby boy March 11 last year _ the first day of a monthlong tribute in which twin columns of light were beamed into the night sky from a spot near ground zero.

``A new life was born
So quietly this evening
To succeed a life in a link.
Now the Towers of Light!
Keep growing taller eternally.''

Half of the book is in Japanese, the other is an English translation, part of which Sumiyama did himself. The poems are mainly a mixture of haiku and the longer tanka style of Japanese poetry.

Sumiyama and his wife, Mari, hope to meet with other families of the victims in New York and give them copies of the collection. They also intend to give copies to local libraries.

Sumiyama hopes someday he and others can put together a book in different languages, representing the many nationalities affected by the attack.

Sumiyama is not the first in his family to publish a book on the Sept. 11 attack.
Harumi, Yoichi's wife, had already written a book on her experience. Titled ``The Life That Went Up in Heaven, the Life That Arrived on Earth,'' it was published in December by Magazine House, a major publishing company.

Yoichi's mother, however, says she has read neither of the books. And, she said, she never will.

``I don't want to look back and have to go through everything again,'' she said.

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