Ricordiamoci dell’ 11 Settembre – Giuseppe Conte

The poem deals with the terrorist attack of September 11th 2002 and highlights the horrifying reality of the massacre, sending a message of tolerance and exhorting the reader to keep in mind the event in order to think about the religious absurd thoughts that caused it.

Therefore it begins with a sentence, in the form of an exhortation: “Ricordiamoci dell’ 11 settembre”. In this way the reader can always keep in mind the point of the text throughout a short and memorisable phrase. Then the poet starts a pretty suggestive characterization of the attack. Defining it a “nebulosa”, the poet gives the idea the event is basically a confuse sum of elements: thousands of deaths, the destruction of a huge urban area etc. that spreads and devastates everything. In its characterization moreover, the poet also uses a metaphor to convey the death of ratio, represented by “materia cerebrale”, which of course stands as the human intellect. The image conveyed gets also reinforced by the connotation given saying that it seemed that the hell came on Earth. Of course this is due to the use of a lot of images referring to the semantic field of destruction and fire or darkness, of which the hell is the kingdom par excellence.

Then there’s the repetition of the first sentence, which separates the first part to the second one, which stands in opposition to the first image of destruction. In this part indeed, the poet exhorts the reader to take distance from the first scenario, suggesting to pursue a religious thought (no matter what) that is innocent: the figure of the child is indeed a metaphor for that. The contrast with the first part is also underlined by the antithesis between God and Hell that respectively come out in the second and in the first part of the poem.