Beautiful Days

 

New York                                    Mount Ontake
11 September 2001             27 September 2014

A beautiful day,
the sky brilliant blue,
cloudless. Calm

till the plane hit:                        till the rumble
flame and smoke;                     beneath our feet
the second plane,                     became a spew:
the same. We saw                     rocks and ash
the towers fall                            erupting into the sky
in on themselves.                      then down on us.

The belching cloud
choked us
as we ran.

***

Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester, England.  His poems have appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Dactyl, Dawntreader, Lunar Poetry, Popshot, Prole, Revival, The Brain of Forgetting and The Stony Thursday Book magazines, in e-magazines and in anthologies in the UK, Ireland and the US.