Tuesday Poem: Commemorating February 22nd 2011—"This Will Be Us""

This Will Be Us

This will be us, one day —
faded photographs
for archivists and future
generations to pore over,
speculating on how
we must have felt, what
it must have been like …
… being lowered
from a high building
on ropes, or having one foot
amputated in situ
by a policeman to free
the rest of the body
from the rubble
of a collapsed building.
.
Or perhaps these historians
yet to come may stare
at footage of suburbs flooded
by silt and sewerage
after groundwater was forced
up by the shock waves
and mains burst