9/11

Yes, I remember where I was. Our daughter

had rung. I switched the tv on in the lounge.

One of the twin towers was smoking – an airplane’s

tail protruding or have I imagined that?

I certainly watched in real time as

a second plane crashed into the other tower.

And then you returned from shopping. You knew.

You had been in the checkout queue in Tesco’s.

We thought of our daughter’s friend who worked

in SoHo north of the World Trade Center,

and our friend on the Lower East Side –

places we had visited only a week before

staying with her in Queens, Long Island.

Later, there were immortal tales of quiet

courage and silent desperation in that

boundless city eclectic as ancient Rome.

When we returned home to our suburban house,

built not long before the first ‘coffin ship’

sailed from Liverpool, near the kitchen door

was a dead buzzard. That such a wild thing,

such a mistress or master of the skies,

such a champion of the heavens,

should die here like some old discarded coat!

Jet-lagged, we buried the mystery

in a border of the garden. In retrospect

it was both omen and memorial.

During a quarter of a century

we have watched the American Empire –

like all of its predecessors

founded on ethnic cleansing and slavery,

triumphant, rapacious, internecine –

slowly devour itself.