For those of you who didn’t catch the 9/11 special on channel Five last night, Simon Armitage has written a poem to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center atrocity.

Written as the first-person account of a fictional trader near the top of the north tower on that day, it was dramatised by Rufus Sewell, and was accompanied by news footage from the day itself as well as interviews with three people who were in the Towers during the attack, and family members of two of the people who died.

I know of Simon Armitage’s work as he is one of the required poets for study on the AQA GCSE syllabus, and have always thought of his work as pretty straight forward, with some depth but not necessarily to my taste. But this work, Out of the Blue, I find to be remarkable in the way that it captures the surrealism of the day, along with the pathos of the ordinary men and women who were caught up in the attack.

I think any attempt of mine to explain the poem would fall short of the reality. You can download the whole text of the poem in .pdf format here:

Out of the Blue by Simon Armitage