We Are Virginia Tech

I wasn't able to catch all of today's convocation in Blacksburg, I had to work on a project for the balance of the afternoon. In one of my breaks, however, I flipped over to CNN's coverage just in time to hear Nikki Giovanni, the noted poet and English professor at Virginia Tech deliver an incredibly moving, and powerful work to the community gathered there. Let me put it this way, anytime you can make an arena full of people in the darkest depths of their mourning and shock and sadness stand up, clap their hands and affirm at the top of their lungs who they are, you're doing your job.

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We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly. We are brave enough to bend to cry, and sad enough to know we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it. But neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS. Neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army.

Neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory. Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water. Neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands, being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized.

No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech. The Hokie nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hand to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be.

We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.