(pains And Regrets Collection) .... The Eleventh Of September Poem by Janice Windle

I was teaching as a substitute teacher on the eleventh of September this year (2008) , in a school I know well. I should not have been surprised when a boy of eleven, far too young to remember the event, reminded me that today was the anniversary of 9/11.

I hadn't been aware till then what today's date was, and then I was reminded of where I was when the news arrived on our TV screens here. Then, again, I was teaching. It was not until I emerged from a very boring meeting after school that I found the staff-room in unaccustomed silence, with a TV monitor switched on to the recurrent images of the terrible events in New York, my colleages sitting dumb-struck. My own spontaneous reaction was extreme - my first thought was fear for my daughter - was World War Three beginning? I shook, felt shocked and ill, for many hours afterwards.

So I thought I'd write a poem about that moment of shock and horror. But words failed me, now as then. This is the nearest I got to writing one: it's about present feelings, though, not about that first dreadful moment of knowledge that the west was so vulnerable.


Today I heard from a child,
as though it were news, an echo
of the beginning of the end.

Seven years ago -
(was it only seven?)
The news
that we must wake up
to the nightmare that was,
and is, and ever shall be -
that baptism of blood.
The end of complacent innocence,
the beginning of doubt,
one more confirmation of disbelief
that humanity deserves
a happy ending.