"Remember, Remember"

"Remember, Remember"

A minute ago we were laughing,
members of the Red Hat Club
packing our purple dresses
blithely saying "I'll meet you there
my plane gets in at..."

A minute, an hour, light years ago
in those luxary days called willing suspension,
the city ringing itself with false security
before bodies and liberty fell
in front of our eyes like ticker tape.

Now time slips off the wrist
smashes its face
on the standstill pavement.
Someone else's legs walk us to the end
of the street, what street, where are we?
Who are we? Frozen in a moment,
our hearts synchronised
to the second when the world changed.
Every tick now a threatening tock,
every impossibility, possible.
The terror's already struck.
The enemy without
pitches a tent inside us.
Even the neighbour's dog is suspect.

Do we light candles? Who snuffs them out?
Ours is the waiting game we don't want to play.
Only the diggers have ways to busy their hands,
the sandwich makers, the undertakers,
those in bunkers making war,
pointing out strategies, planning
someone else's tragedy, another mother,
father, sister, lover, brother, friend
who'll never again have that final embrace.

We wait and watch, make phone calls,
send e mails, stum ourselves numb with news
trying to take it in. The attraction
of the repulsive. Watch again, slow motion,
almost soundless, angling,
a soft dent of resounding flames.
Letters home die in the throat.
"A part of each of us is missing."

How do we begin the mourning,
start the day, parts with no bodies,
unobtainable numbers, unanswered calls,
unrecquited messages flung into
the land of forever-gone
and all the as yet undead to follow.

Every last "I love you",
matched by angry partings, impatient words
left hanging in the unspoken air.
"I didn't even kiss him goodbye."
"I had my lipstick on."
How the hangover saved the young man,
late for work, stopping for a coffee.
Another's delayed train, change of mind.
Chance and circumstance.
The stroppy one who disobeyed,
ran for her life,
passing the firemen running
the other way,
into the inferno.

Now, there's no one to talk to.
They're all in the air, or elsewhere
or otherwise gone. Just this silence,
smuggling words into caves,
no longer assuming agreement.
We look at strangers now with both eyes,
and that third one called "what if".
Panic in the veins,
the screws of suspicion tightening
from whatever corner of our world we view it,
whatever way the world as we knew it.

Judi Benson

thank you