Manchester Poet Responds to Tragedy

At the New Yorker, Ed Caesar applauds Manchester poet Tony Walsh's poem, written and performed as a tribute to the concert-goers who died at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on Monday. Caesar makes an interesting point, that although the circumstances might have called for a poet of wider-renown, Walsh's connection to the city made his words all the more powerful: "Walsh delivered a performance of a poem so resonant that the crowd cheered and laughed, and the eyes of the grown men who stood on either side of me grew glassy." From there:

The city authorities called “a vigil” for 6 P.M., but Albert Square was teeming well before then. After the horrors that took place at the end of an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena on Monday, and the news that twenty-two people had died, including children as young as eight, Mancunians were naturally searching for some kind of meaning in the tragedy, or at least for togetherness in the face of it. But there was dissonance everywhere. Work had carried on, for most, as normal. Schoolchildren took exams. Criminal courts were in session. Moreover, today was the first ice-cream day of the British summer: blue skies and vapor trails. It was hard to reckon with such horrifying news in such pleasant weather.

There is no protocol for a vigil that I know of. But, by some peculiar reflex, everybody in Albert Square seemed to know what to do. Just before the clock of the town hall struck six, some loudspeakers began to play Edward Elgar’s “Nimrod,” which is as close to a national anthem of mourning as Britain possesses. (It is “Nimrod” that is played on Remembrance Day, when we commemorate our war dead.) When the music stopped, an impromptu silence, lasting at least a minute and started by nobody, began. I couldn’t hear a single conversation; the wind in the trees was audible. Meanwhile, a stream of worthies filed onto the stage, including the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn; the new mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham; the Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron; and the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. The silence was only broken when one of the dignitaries onstage began clapping—at which point, everybody else clapped, too.

Read on at the New Yorker.