9/11

Because there was a chance we might need each other,
and because I left for lunch early to gawp at it

between the knot of panicked bodies
watching it happen through the shop window that flogged

TV’s for a pittance. Because your world,
or what you thought was your world,

was sinking into the hadalpelagic zone;
your good term grades, your collection of Trollope novels,

the features of your boyfriends’s face
in the passing bioluminescence of a hatchet fish.

Because the BBC news had always been like
an ‘adult conversation’ that made your head

throb, because the news reporter felt like your father,
and was everywhere, telling you that in your short life

you had got it wrong, that no nightmare was impossible,
and after the sight of it, nothing would be the same again.

Because somehow I had managed to find you
when I needed to ring my wife, my own daughter;

the sight of your hands clinging to the sodden remnants of a knap kin;
Your frame perched on the monument where I often ate my sandwiches.

Because if I hadn’t I would remember on every memorial year
the way your tears stopped just shy of your chin.

Because you needed someone to haul you out of it,
because for that moment I was the only one that knew you;

I sat down and asked

‘are you ok?’