Here is the survivor's poem.

Now, we kindly ask for your attention.

Please hold the hands of the people next to you
Remain silent and hold your applause
As a group of breast cancer survivors moves toward the stage.
These women surround an empty circle.
Inside it, spirit.
The spirit of all those lost to breast cancer.
We use this circle of survivors to remember a time when there was laughter and conversation.
We use it to bring back, for a moment, the sounds of their voices,
The fleeting mist of their faces in the eyes of our minds.
A circle for all of the memories.
Of a time when there was life and conversation.
When they walked with us.
All of the promise.
The beauty.
The laughter.
It is a circle to hold all of the sorrow.
All of our loss.
And a time for us to remember them:
With our thoughts
and our tears.
To create a place where it is safe to let your tears fall, into the arms of all those around you.
The women around the circle represent another spirit
The spirit of survival.
The spirit to keep living.
The promise of a new self
A new life, not ordered by the limits of the past
But wide open to the wildest of dreams
It holds all of our x000 spirits, gathered here today,
it holds our magnificence
and it holds the thought that if we can do this
we can do anything.

In the face of fear.
In the face of the unknown.
The spirit to bear all the things

That cause us to rest, to quit, to sit, to cease,
And remake them
Into reasons
To keep walking.

Today, we connect with the spirits of the departed
We honor the unstoppable spirit of the survivors
And we walk for both.

Today we create a living breathing human monument
More beautiful than any cast in bronze or carved of granite
And our monument shouts to all who will hear
We will never give up.
We will never give up.
We are alive, and we will never give up.