RICORDIAMOCI DELL’11 SETTEMBRE – Giuseppe Conte

This poem was written after the attack to the World Trade Center and it reflects about what is happened. The massage the writer wants to produce is that the attack must never be forgotten.
The title of the poem coincides with the first line. The sentence “ricordiamoci dell’11 settembre” is addressed not only to the reader but to the whole humankind. The use of numbers is unusual into poetry, but the writer wants to fix into reader’s mind the number, to support his thesis.
The first ten lines are characterized by the relation between the smoke and men’s body. In fact the semantic field of smoke is made by “fuoco”, “nebulosa”, “fumo”, “grigio”, “espandeva”, “polvere” and “calce”. The semantic field of man is made by “carne”, “mortale”, “volti” and “uomini”.
In line 2 the alliteration of sound “f” in “fuoco fulmineo” is interesting: it connotes the smoke inasmuch the fire is something that happen before the smoke, but the words refer to the action of airplanes that went “fulminei” to the Twin Towers.
The relation between human body and the construction that caused the smoke is made by the alliteration of sound “c” into “carburante e carne”. In my opinion this is the most relevant image because the writer is good to write into two words the horror caused by the attack. The writer pulls close the subject that made the attack and the objective that is the victim. Moreover “carburante” is a part of the plane, and “carne” is a part of man.
It’s interesting the 4^th and 5^th. The reader can see a chiasmus between “sangue”, “materia cerebrale”, “fumo grigio” and “mortale”. The easier association is between “sangue” and “mortale” because it refers to the death, but is interesting the association between “materia cerebrale” and “fumo grigio”: the brain is also known as gray matter, so the words “fumo grigio” is strictly related to “materia cerebrale”.
A climax is present from line 5 to line 10: the climax is the growth of the smoke that convey to the reader the growth of a massacre. The climax is made by the objective description of the smoke that expanded, later the smoke is made by feelings of hate, furthermore there is a negative exaltation of the smoke and the climax concludes with the region of Hell that gives the idea of an horrendous massacre.
The poem concludes with an invocation to the whole world: it begins with the first line of the poem to reiterate the concept of memory. The semantic field of the last part of the poem is religious field: the repetition of the same word God and the use of the same word but into different function (preghiamo-preghiera) in the same line. At last the word God is nearly to word “assassino” as an oxymoron to convey to the reader the idea that Someone good par excellence can’t be evil. This highlights the absurdity of those religious causes produced as justifications.