September 2001

At dusk, a raucous gang from rougher streets
invades the neighbourhood. Cat-calling names,
they block the path, and steal our children's sweets,
then riot after dark - Ardoyne in flames.
Forewarned by anxious parents not to play
with strangers from the Protestant estate,
white-faced, the children traipse to school each day
in silence, down a blind alley of hate.
"Falling towers Jerusalem, New York,
Belfast, unreal." Amidst calamity,
like caged doves cowering from a circling hawk,
quietly lamenting frail humanity -
make one last call to say, "I love you."
A 'towering inferno' burns above you.

During the Summer of 2001 the Sonnet Board was really active; it was not unusual to find four or five poems posted up in one day. Following 9/11 there was a kind of stunned silence, no one posted anything for days. It was Vaughn Fitts who broke the silence on the 15th, a Sunday, with this fine sonnet of understated outrage:

A Call To Arms

--following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center

An acrid stench still lingers in the haze
above the twisted wreckage of the towers,
where New York's Bravest race against the hours
to pull survivors from the tangled maze.
How can we understand the gruesome ways
of zealots who invoke their higher powers,
and follow hateful plans of one who cowers
behind a faith whose God this act betrays?

All freedom loving nations must unite
against the deadly smoke that fouls our mists,
if we are to assuage our loss and pain.
And we must find new strategies to fight
this menacing pollution, which insists
we never breathe that sweeter air again.

I felt honoured and privileged to grieve alongside my new found American friends; the quiet dignity and honesty which they displayed throughout was so impressive.

I think a number of us probably hesitated to post anything on the subject, I mean, what could be said? In the week before 9/11 events in Belfast had been in the news. A ridiculous stand-off where Catholic children had to be escorted by police, parents and a priest down a human corridor of hatred as Protestant residents tried to block access to a Catholic school. This lesser but nonetheless dispiriting incident was wiped from the headlines by events at the World Trade Centre.

In a way the sonnet I posted on October 5th records this dislocation. I'd started to write something about the events at Holy Cross Primary just before the shocking footage of the World Trade Centre attack dominated every channel. Almost immediately afterwards footage of jubilant Palistinian youths celebrating the success of the attack began to be broadcast too. 

By the 16th September George Bush was already talking about a 'crusade' and a 'War on Terror'. Words from 'The Waste Land' came to mind - the recurrent image of the 'Unreal City' - Falling towers Jerusalem, Athens Alexandria, Vienna, London...

And maybe in this poem, which mixes cool reportage with more florid, richer diction, incorporating contemporary references and literary allusion I stumbled on a voice which over the next couple of years began to be seen as distinctly mine and ended up with David Anthony talking about a typically Wickesian sonnet.