Missing Person

There are no roses at the end,

No raised glasses, no speeches,
As a missing person makes the world lighter,
Leaves everyone with a kind of debt.

A name that has no-one floats away
Like a dropped holiday photograph
Of no-one waving from lost blue seas.

A ghost's bedroom is guarded like a prince's,
By mothers, wives, and soldier ranks
Of empty suits and empty shoes.
A ghost has an answering machine but no home,

The parabolas of jets and bombs,
Lead to a new geological age, to fossil lives.
They leave no place, no centre, for love to go to;
Love can just catch trains of half-remembered conversations
That lead only to pictures of a ghost.

Firemen, soldiers, the inquiring spades that probe as shrapnel,
Police dogs. These are guests at a kind of wedding
Where ghost and man fuse.

Behind Police Line Don't Cross tapes,
A policewoman with his wallet blots out the sun.

--Michael Brett (1934- ), British poet, first published in Heroes: 100 Poems from the new Generation of War Poets

9/11 Poem from London

Tomorrow, it will all run backwards.

The steel tsunamis will froth back upwards
And become solid.
The planes will be pulled out like javelins
And slide backwards, swallowing their vapour trails.

Tomorrow, everyone will be fine.

Tomorrow, everyone who died will come home.
They will sit again at the tables of home
And rejoin life's fellowship, its snapshots, tea
And picnics.

Tomorrow, all will be well.

Everyone will sleep as babies do under mobiles,
Untroubled by strange sounds, of aero engines
Flying too low and shadows over the streets.

Tomorrow, mobile phones will be just toys again.


The sky will be clear, blue, unbroken.

-Michael Brett (1936- ), British poet, published on 12/31/2009.

Links to poems about 9/11, curated by the Library of Congress, can be found here: https://guides.loc.gov/poetry-of-september-11/selected-poems