Poet de Borchgrave Spreads Hope After 9/11

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave desperately wanted to do something to help comfort the victims’ families. But she didn’t know what. So she prayed.

“Every night, I prayed that same prayer over and over again, ‘Please, Lord, just give me something that I could do.’ I had no idea what it could be,” the author, poet, and photographer told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.

For a year, de Borchgrave got no answer. Then, on the first anniversary of 9/11, she watched as children stood at ground zero and called out the names of the parents they had lost in the attacks.

“The very next day, I woke up with a strange feeling in my heart, and I knew that something was going to happen,” she said.

What happened was that de Borchgrave was inspired to write poetry.

“All these prayers in the form of poems flew out of me,” she said. “I felt I was being told, ‘OK, you really want something to do, here it is. And if you do it, it will go where you want it to go.’”

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She consulted her husband, award-winning journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at large with United Press International and the Washington Times as well as a Newsmax correspondent. He encouraged her to keep writing.

She ended up penning 30 poems. A friend suggested that she illustrate them with 16th-century Mughal paintings from India. They were published in a book, “Healing Light: Thirty Messages of Love, Hope and Courage.”

“Everything has been put together to bring comfort,” de Borchgrave said during the Newsmax interview.

De Borchgrave later completed a second book of poems, illustrated with 17th-century Japanese art, called “Heavenly Order: Twenty-Five Meditations of Wisdom and Harmony.”

The third volume of the trilogy, “Beloved Spirit: Pathways to Love, Grace and Mercy,” came out recently and is illustrated with 16th-century Persian art.

De Borchgrave had completed her prayer for the 9/11 victims and their families, but she thought inspirational reading could do more to help others who were suffering. So she started an organization, The Light of Healing Hope Foundation, which provides books of hope to hospital patients and their families. It is now active in four hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area.

“I think that it’s very important for all of us who are suffering in one way or another to find the zone of calm and peace where we can allow our heart and our souls to be open to comfort and healing,” de Borchgrave said. “And that perhaps can allow more of the medicine to work its way into the system.”

De Borchgrave said her own spiritual inspiration stems from a lesson about forgiveness that she learned at age 9 in Sunday school.

“I think that has been the single most important guiding light for me,” she said. “To believe in forgiveness and try to understand those who are not exactly on our wavelength, to try to understand where they are coming from.”

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